The 2023 League of Legends World Championship, which will begin on October 10, is just around the way. The biggest event of the year is steadily approaching, and it appears that Riot Games won’t permit League streaming celebrities to costream the event.
According to a report from esports journalist LCS Eevee on Twitter on Aug. 24, Worlds 2023 won’t have any costreams this year. The sources for this, reportedly, are Nick “LS” De Cesare and Marc Robert “Caedrel” Lamont.
The fans are outraged by this and swarmed to League’s subreddit as they loved having the option to watch their favorite streamers cast, especially if they didn’t like the hand-selected staff for that day.
“They want to unopen Pandora’s box, costreaming is such an insanely good deal for the streamers but hurts Riot’s control over the narrative and viewership. I want to watch costreams over Riot stream, but I understand why they don’t want costreams, their own fault was allowing it in the first place,” said one League player, nailing down the issue in its core.
While streamers easily benefit from costreaming, Riot can’t really control and moderate what’s going on on their broadcasts. More importantly, their official streams on Twitch and Youtube have lower viewership because of it.
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Fans, however, enjoy more casual streams where they can get a deeper insight and pro player-level analysis, and the community is now asking for at least one separate stream that would be more chill.
The simplest solution here, as one player suggested, is to sell costreaming rights. Although this could be a step forward, it’s quite possible the overall revenue Riot makes from ads is far greater and streamers simply may not be able to compete with that.