Riot Games has announced that it will start giving out rewards to viewers. Following the successful implementation of viewership rewards in games like CS: GO and Overwatch, League of Legends viewers will also get a chance to earn various cosmetic items.
We’ve always aspired to go this direction, and during this year’s World Championship we are taking the first small steps on that journey (and it is a journey, so expect a lot more after Worlds). Starting in October when Worlds matches are live, you’ll begin to see missions pop up in your client and on Lolesports.com that will reward you with loot when you watch World Championship games. There will be a few opportunities each week to earn Worlds Tokens that unlock emotes, icons, chromas, borders and more in the Worlds Loot Shop. Watch Rewards will offer some extra exclusive goodies like rare icons and some secret surprises that superfans watching A LOT of Worlds could uncover.
Players will get missions within the LoL client. They have to sign into their account of lolesports.com in order to be eligible for these rewards.
How Does it Work?
Riot Games has detailed instructions on how to avail the reward benefits. Players will be rewarded for watching at least ten minutes of live gameplay or VODS. However, Riot Games will only reward live viewers. They might bring in rewards for watching rebroadcasts at a later stage.
Watch Missions will start appearing on September 30th and will be available through November 10th. To start, players will need to login on watch.lolesports.com/rewards and view games on the site using the embedded streams from Twitch and Youtube. In the future, we want to expand support for other platforms, but we feel that this is a great place to start while we gather feedback from all of you. We know that fans prefer lots of different watch experiences, and so do we – we’ll look to increase the breadth of our support in the future.
Here is an image which aptly describes how the watch missions will look visually.
Watch Missions will incentivise players to play the game as well
‘Watch Missions’ will start from September 10 and continue till November 10th. This decision follows several actions of cutbacks and financial problems within Riot Games. Its primary backer Tencent Games has shifted its focus to the other new games on the market, leaving Riot Games resorting to several efficiency measures. One of these measures is not to send their casters to Korea for the Worlds.
We expect Riot Games to provide more integration with other streaming services like Twitch and Youtube in the near future. For now, you can only complete Watch Missions via their official website.
Watch Missions will have other purposes as well.
The primary purpose of the Watch Missions is to incentivise players to watch esports. Despite a declining player base, League of Legends still has a large number of daily active players. Converting these players to esports viewers would be a big boost for Riot Games. They would be able to leverage this to their backers in order to prove the gaming community’s continued interest in LoL esports.
The Watch Missions will also incentivise players to play the game in order to earn rewards. There might also be other missions like playing a particular hero driving up viewer engagement.
With these changes, Riot Games aims to increase the viewership numbers for League of Legends. Whether it will be enough for League is still up for debate.
