Ninjas in Pyjamas is joining the League of Legends: Wild Rift scene in China. The organization will be competing in the upcoming LPL qualifiers where slots to League Mobile’s Chinese league and the Wild Rift World Championship 2021 will be up for grabs.
The qualifiers will be held in September 2021, where 16 LPL teams (all except Suning) will be competing. The top five teams, according to Liquipedia, will qualify for the Chinese league, which will begin later this year as the top competition for Wild Rift in the country.
This move comes as part of NiP’s merger with Chinese esports organization ESV5, which was announced earlier today. With this deal, ESV5’s slot in China’s premier League of Legends league, the LPL, will be rebranded from Victory Five to Ninjas in Pyjamas next year.
Related: Ninjas in Pyjamas merges with ESV5, will compete in China’s LPL in 2022
Additionally, ESV5’s eStar Gaming, which fields a roster in Tencent’s mobile MOBA Honor of Kings, will expand more in mobile esports as a part of NiP. Unlike the LPL slot, eStar Gaming will not be rebranded to NiP and will continue with the same name.
Hicham Chahine, the co-CEO of NiP, said the organization is excited to enter mobile gaming with this merger.
“We [will] also not only continue competing in core esports titles on PC, but we [have] also set ourselves up for a very exciting market which is growing rapidly, which is mobile gaming,” Chahine said.
EStar Gaming won the prestigious Honor of Kings World Champion Cup 2019, where it pocketed about $1.9 million. The mobile MOBA game has been developed and published in China by Tencent. The company claimed in 2020 that the game has over 100 million daily active users.
