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The next time you have a spare esports moment, watch and compare last week’s League of Legends European Championship (LEC) games with the archived shows from 2013 onwards. The league moved from the ESL studios in Cologne to its dedicated Berlin space five years ago, and through its journey broadcasts have improved both subtly and significantly. The jump to HD and smoother on-screen graphics are obvious, but keener eyes can also notice the expansion of the studio-space; from the casting desk to the post-game lobby.
Overseer of these changes is head of esports production Jose Diego Klingenberg Tramullas. Originally joining the publisher on the technical side of League of Legends, he transitioned to a production role pretty much at the same time as Riot Games did, and now oversees everything from broadcast engineering to the execution of the bi-annual season finals roadshows.
He told The Esports Observer that Riot Games EU began really ramping up studio capabilities in 2018, the year prior to the LEC rebrand. “I’m sure you may have heard of the ‘EU production’ memes and what they used to mean in the past,” he said. “We built our brand new installation here, the control room, from scratch, and we leveled up in almost everything we were doing, in terms of tech and investment.”
It comes as no surprise that the majority of Riot Games’ European budget is directed toward its Berlin esports operations, going directly into the design and execution of the LEC, or indirectly through the employment of full-time producers and staff. Between 100-200 people can be found working on any regular-season broadcast day, including Rioters, those from production partners, front of house, and security. That number balloons north of 400 people for the roadshows.
While some esports are jumping to arena-only formats, the LEC less resembles a typical sports broadcast than it does the live taping of a TV talk show, both in terms of audience size and space. Ironically, the competition is only transmitted digitally, and Tramullas explained that this actually makes it a far more complicated production than if it were on traditional television.
“If we were to also produce for traditional TV, it would be super easy, it wouldn’t actually add to the complexity,” he explained. The LEC produces over five different feeds; the main English broadcast for Twitch and YouTube, plus a specific feed for local partners who might have different sponsors at the digital level.
“The main reason we’re not on traditional TV right now is our audience at the moment is not there,” said Tramullas. “It doesn’t mean that we are never going to be there, in fact, some places in Europe we are there.”
The channels he is referring to include Polsat in Poland, which not only produces a regional language feed of the LEC, but also runs the Ultraliga European Regional League (ERL).
“[TV broadcasters] are the ones trying to reach the audience that they are slowly losing, especially if you look at young, more tech orientated audiences,’ he added. “They are slowly but surely dropping out of television channels and moving more to the internet and digital venues.”
This is also the first year that the LEC, as well as the North American League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), are broadcasted in China by exclusive broadcast partner Huya. Until recent years, the audience crossover between east and western League of Legends has been very much in favor of South Korea and China. While both regions have almost always had English staff on site to provide play-by-play, it was only last year that the LEC recruited its own dedicated Korean language commentator.
While the Chinese livestreaming landscape is worlds apart from the west, Tramullas said technically it didn’t change much to the broadcast—primarily because his team had been preparing for it through 2018-19. “We are thinking long term. Now it’s the LEC, but let’s see what the future brings with Riot. We always need to keep in mind that we are growing; we have more games, more partners, more shows, so we’re designing everything to be scalable.”
Major advances were also made to the onscreen layout of League of Legends esports, which has played a big part in its commercial offerings to partners. Branding rights to the Baron Power Play, a key gameplay moment, has been bought up by the likes of Red Bull and Shell.
One of the more unusual naming rights emerged at the start of the LEC 2020 season; with KitKat sponsoring the in-game pauses that occur, more often than not, due to technical errors. These pauses can happen when a player doesn’t feel their mouse or keyboard action isn’t translating properly to screen, or due to some kind of connection issue. They’ve plagued leagues in all regions, even the finals of last year’s World Championships.
“At the end of the day, there are multiple reasons that can cause a pause,” explained Tramullas, whose team has worked to alleviate the problems somewhat over the years. “The amount of different playtesting that we do to test multiple different peripherals [mice, keyboards, etc.] in combination with what players will use on stage with our PCs has spiked drastically in the last couple of years.
“We try to track and monitor everything that we find and report it to get it fixed as soon as possible. On top of that, we are making efforts on the broadcasting side to make pauses less intrusive for the experience.” Eliminating pauses is a constant KPI for the production team, and in worst-case scenarios, a game can be remade entirely using back-machine backstage.
From April 25-26, the LEC will take its Spring finals to Budapest; the first event Riot has held in Hungary. While past roadshows repeated venues in Spain and London, the need to reach new players will take the company to unfamiliar venues, which throws up new challenges.
“The more modern the venue is, the easier it is for us,” said Tramullas. “We have a digital product in a video game, so, for example, things like the networking—whether or not they actually have very solid fiber connection straight to the venue that we can leverage for production or producing our show.”
Space is the other key component. While accommodating the aforementioned 400 staff is one concern, another is realizing the event’s ambitions. At last year’s Summer finals in Athens, the expo-style partner/community area (first introduced in 2019) required 27 booths and over 3,000 meters of space parallel to the games, all of which communicated to cities looking to bid for future finals.
“When we’re looking at the host city process and what we want from cities is two-fold,” said Tramullas. “Obviously we want to make our lives easier when it comes to production costs and incentives, but that’s only a minor part.”
Similar to the way the World Championships in 2019 was able to blend League of Legends with iconic Parisian landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, cities are keen to project their desired image, and make the average person aware that a video game tournament is that week’s marquee event.
“It’s been fantastic to take this new approach where we’re collaborating with them, rather than fighting and asking for permits and waiting for a month or two to get a no,” remarked Tramullas. “It’s been a huge improvement on our end, and I think that people are going to see that more and more evidently as we move in this process.”
