On January 5, Riot Games released its 2024 outlook for League of Legends esports, in which the 2024 Mid-Season Championship will be held in Chengdu from May 1-19, marking the second time the tournament has come to China since it was held in Shanghai in 2016.
At the same time, Riot Games has made changes to global esports events so that MSI winners will qualify directly for the World Finals, regardless of the base seat in their region.
Riot Games said it hopes these changes will continue to increase the adversarial nature of the tournament and bring the two most important League of Legends events – the Mid-Season Championship and the World Championship – closer together.
For LPL, after the collapse of the Asian Games and the World Finals last year, it urgently needs a heavyweight championship to stabilize the situation.
The importance of MSI as a global event held in the middle of the year has long been underestimated, and although Riot has made many reforms and efforts, it has achieved little in practice.
The focus of this tournament reform is that Riot directly "bundled" MSI with the World Finals, thereby increasing the importance and competitiveness of MSI. At the S14 World Finals, LEC, LCS, LCK, and LPL each have three basic World Finals spots, PCS and VCS each have two World Finals spots, and LLA and CBLOL each have one World Finals spot.
In addition, the winner of MSI will directly participate in the S14 World Finals, which will not take up the base spot in their region. MSI's runner-up region will also receive an additional World Finals spot, but the runners-up will still need to fight in the summer playoffs in their region to qualify for the S14 World Finals.
In this way, it not only objectively enhances the appreciation and confrontation of MSI, but also further enhances the gold content of the event.
Although MSI is regarded as the second largest global tournament in League of Legends, after the World Championship held every year, and its winners, like the World Championships, must beat teams from other regions of the world to win the championship, but the gold content has been questioned by the outside world, and it is difficult to compare with the World Championships.
For most fans and viewers, only by winning the World Finals can they be called "World Champions" in the true sense, even if they are as strong as RNG in 2018 and JDG in 2023, as long as they miss the World Finals, all the honors they have achieved before will be almost instantly zeroed.
If the World Finals are a final exam, then the MSI is more like a midterm mock exam – MSI, while very important, is also easy to forget, after all, most people only remember the final scores, and forget how many points were scored on the midterm mock exam.
As early as 2015, EDG, which represented the LPL region, defeated SKT, the predecessor of T1, in the finals and won the final championship, judging from the title alone, EDG broke the curse of LPL without a championship, but the outside world did not "recognize" this championship, until iG won the World Finals in 2018, whether it was e-sports practitioners or ordinary fans, they thought that LCK's dominance in the League of Legends project was broken.
For EDG, this championship is more like a spell and shackles, being labeled as a "civil war insider, foreign war outsider", and "dropping the chain" in the foreign war for a long time, until the 2021 World Finals, when being looked down by the outside world all the way, he slashed Gen.G and DK in a row, and finally won the championship to complete the "redemption".
Throughout the history of MSI, the LPL region is a well-deserved "first division", winning championships in 2015, 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2023, respectively, and has been "far ahead" of the LCK region next door.
Not only has the LPL achieved three consecutive championships for MSI in the past three years, but RNG has also won the championship in 2018, 2021 and 2022 on behalf of the LPL region, becoming the team with the most championships in this event and becoming a well-deserved "King of MSI".
In the 2022 MSI Finals promotional video, xiaohu, who is still playing for RNG, said: "We will definitely win this championship, we are the real king of the mid-season championship." ”
To put it simply, if Faker and his T1 represent the highest mountain and the longest river in the League of Legends professional arena, then when it comes to MSI, it really can't stand the pursuit of LPL.
At last year's MSI, T1 lost to JDG and BLG with a score of 2:3 and 1:3 in a row, and suffered the embarrassment of being "double-killed" by LPL for the first time in team history.
It's just that today's T1 has returned to the world's No. 1 throne with the feat of completing the LPL in the World Finals last year, while RNG is mired in various disputes.
It is very unrealistic to expect RNG to snipe LCK on MSI, and the heavy responsibility will most likely fall on the shoulders of teams such as JDG, BLG, and TES.
Compared with the relatively "lengthy" schedule of the World Finals, MSI's schedule is shorter, which will limit the play of LCK teams to a certain extent, although in terms of front-end team configuration, LPL is almost the same as LCK, but there is still an obvious gap in the middle and back office such as logistics management and game version analysis, once the schedule is extended, it will give LCK teams enough space and time to slowly analyze and study the version, so as to show a continuous evolution throughout the game.
Backed by Chengdu's home advantage and the long-term monopoly advantage of the competition, LPL still has to strive to continue its dominance in MSI. What's more, there is also the temptation to go straight to the World Finals, once you successfully win the championship, you can fully prepare for the World Finals in the following time, which will further increase the probability of winning the final championship.
Since esports competitions are restricted by the version of the game, it is not uncommon for teams to perform well in MSI but not to do well in the Worlds. The emergence of the direct qualification has reduced the probability of MSI "overturning" in the World Finals to a certain extent.
Last year's LPL was not easy, losing one after another in the Asian Games and the World Finals, and in the World Finals, it suffered a tragedy of being worn by T1. For LPL, a championship is urgently needed to calm the mood of all parties.
After the end of last year's World Finals, discussions on "how many years has there been no super newcomer in the LPL" have emerged one after another, and Zeus, who won the FMVP in the finals, is in the third year of his career this year.
Bin, 369, Knight, etc., who have always been called the new generation, have had four years of shortest careers. Even Ning, the champion MVP player of the 2018 World Finals, sighed: "There are too few rookies in the past two years, and it is still our generation that is playing." ”
In such a situation, even if there is a capital to form the "Galaxy Battleship", it is also repeated permutations and combinations in the original player pool, and it is difficult to help the team improve the upper limit of hard power when the operation awareness and playing style of the individual players have been relatively finalized.
Unless JDG invests heavily in a powerful Korean reinforcement like Ruler, it will be difficult for a team to have a qualitative change in strength in the short term.
However, the current capital trend is not conducive to the introduction of Korean aid with high salaries, and the capital activity of the entire industry is not as good as before. According to incomplete statistics, there will be more than 10 investment events in China's e-sports industry in 2023, far less than before 2021.
Before esports clubs have fully explored sustainable ways to make money, funding from the investment and financing market is extremely important.
For example, among the 17 clubs in the LPL that participated in the professional league this year, clubs dominated by large enterprises accounted for nearly half of the places. Including JDG, which is owned by JD.com, BLG under Bilibili, LNG under Li Ning, TT under TT voice operator Qumaru Technology, UP under Nengxing Group, and TES under Taobo.
For these large enterprises, e-sports clubs play more of a role in brand promotion and occupy the minds of young people, and it is difficult for an investor like Zhu Yihang, the son of Zhu Mengyi, the founder of Hopson Development Group, to establish a complete e-sports industry chain of e-sports education, theme industrial parks, animation, film and television and IP incubation through e-sports clubs.
That is to say, when large enterprises like JD.com and Bilibili are tired of e-sports, which is the time when the relevant club is about to be sold or abandoned, if there is not enough investment and financing market to support, it is difficult for an e-sports club to obtain a relatively stable development space, because changing hands or selling requires a receiver, and with the current capital situation, the enthusiasm for investing in e-sports will be relatively cautious.
According to the "2023 China E-sports Industry Report", the actual annual revenue of China's e-sports industry was 26.35 billion yuan, a decrease of 1.31% compared with 2022. Although it was the second consecutive year of decline, the decline narrowed compared to the previous year.
Although the downward trend of the industry is decreasing, the future growth space is still worrying. In terms of revenue composition, e-sports live streaming revenue is the largest, accounting for 80.87%, while the performance of game live streaming platforms in the recent past has not been satisfactory. In the past few years, Douyu's revenue has continued to decline, with revenue of 9.6 billion yuan, 9.1 billion yuan, and 7.1 billion yuan from 2019 to 2022 respectively, and the total revenue of Douyu in the first half of this year is only 2.87 billion yuan, a decrease of 21% compared with the same period in 2022. Even, the head of this head game live broadcast platform was arrested by the police for gambling.
In this way, in the case of few talented teenagers, it is not possible to activate the banknote ability to buy Korean aid, and LPL will enter a long "anti-Korean cycle" in the future.