League of Legends the leading e-sport

More than 2000 fans have watched two teams battle in the Oceania finals, but there wasn’t a ball or a bat in sight.

The League of Legends Oceania finals.

This weekend more than 2000 fans descended on Brisbane’s Courier Mail Piazza to watch two teams duke it out in the Oceania finals, but there wasn’t a ball or a bat in sight. The sport was League of Legends, a 3D third-person multiplayer online battle arena game, and the world’s most popular e-sport.

Tim Wendel, better known as Carbon, is Legacy’s captain and lives in a share house with the rest of his team, where eight men spend about 12 hours a day honing their skills.

“We have a really tight schedule, and where we live is where we work, so we have to define really tight boundaries,” he tells The Australian.

Carbon, who not only plays on the team but runs the Legacy brand and business, which includes other games, says he does not make a lot of money as a professional gamer but Riot Games — the developer and publisher of League of Legends — does pay for the house’s rent and bills, giving them effectively zero living costs.

“Legacy is sponsored the same way a football club or sports team would be sponsored,” he said.

“We have names on our jerseys, we do stuff on social media with our house, and all our gear is always up to date.”

Carbon said it was standard practice globally for professional teams to share a house.

“It’s a very different environment having to live with who you work with,” he said. “It’s a high-pressure environment, because we’re playing a high-performance e-sport. Everyone here is striving to be the best and that brings tension into the house, but we rarely have fights.”

Riot Games, which describes its game as a mix between basketball, chess and Pokemon, created the first professional e-sports league in 2015 and has invested more than $500,000 into teams and players locally since 2015.

It has now secured a partnership deal with Hoyts to be the first e-sport regularly shown on the big screen in Australia and New Zealand, with the finals over the weekend broadcast in seven different cities across the countries.

Riot Games Oceania’s sports manager, Daniel Ringland, says e-sports have been played in Asia for a long time but that popularity is finally crossing over to the West.

“A lot of companies have raised money and tried to make e-sports popular, but the problem was people who watch e-sports generally watch other sports as well,” Ringland said. “So they’re used to professionalism and a good experience whether that’s the NBA, the NRL or whatever it might be. Companies needed to come close to matching that professionalism and quality, and those things are very expensive.”

Ringland says Riot Games runs a World Series every year but is more focused in Australia on building out the domestic leagues.

“We’re focused here in the Sydney office on building out that local infrastructure, so that by the time a team gets to the Oceania league like Legacy, they’re generating fans and merchandise, and they have big social media pages.

“What we’re really trying to do is provide a great viewer experience for people who love video games. For example in NRL, I’m a Rabbitohs supporter and I feel like I’m part of that community. I can talk with friends about how good or bad our team has done that week, and I’m part of something bigger.”

There’s a lot at stake. E-sports marketing intelligence firm Newzoo forecasts that brands will spend $US128 million ($167m) on e-sports sponsoring and another $US197m on advertising around e-sports video content this year, bringing total brand spend to $US325m.