There’s been trouble brewing between League of Legends developer Riot Games and games reseller G2A since it transpired that the latter had published ads on its site for a naughty third-party site that sells LoL accounts and elo boosters, and today Riot confirm that they’ve banned G2A from sponsoring professional teams.
In fact, the ban’s been in place since September 18th, but it wasn’t common knowledge until Riot’s developer relations/3rd party ecosystem manager (hell of a job title) J Eckert posted the following on Reddit:
“We’ve already formally banned [G2A] as a sponsor as of September 18th, and have no plans to reconsider the decision at this time.
“This was NOT a decision we made lightly, and came after many weeks of back and fourth [sic] conversations with G2A to find a resolution, which we were not able to reach an agreement on. We do not at all enjoy affecting the income of the teams, but the LCS rules include guidelines specifically against this sort of thing. We did however keep teams in the loop during the process in an attempt to avoid any surprises.
“EDIT – To clarify, it seems the wording I used was a bit ambiguous on “an agreement”. Rest assured, ‘Remove all account selling an boosting-site links’ was indeed our request. We weren’t going to compromise our values on that one in the sake of preserving the sponsorships.”
It’s interesting that G2A were presumably unwilling to meet Riot’s demands – without wishing to extrapolate too much, it suggests that whatever they earn from advertising the LoL account reseller exceeds reveue from sponsoring professional teams. You can certainly appreciate Riot’s position, too: account resellers allow new players to essentially bypass the game’s finely tuned ranking system, which of course would result in absolute chaos. At the very least, some angry redditors.
Among the teams affected by Riot’s decision are Cloud9, Counter Logic Gaming, H2K, and paiN Gaming, all of whom have pulled G2A logos from their gear at the 2015 League of Legends World Championship, held in venues across Europe throughout October.
Thanks, Daily Dot.