If you’ve ever wondered whether successful League of Legends teams are getting paid enough, look no further than the MSI prize pool. Contributions from fans alone through sales of the Conqueror Karma skin and the Conqueror ward skin have added $1.4 million USD to the MSI prize pool.
The total prize pool including Riot’s contribution is now about $1.7 million.
Twenty-five percent of all the sales have gone towards that prize pool. Let’s break that down. If $5 can get you 650 RP, that means that one dollar equals 130 RP, which means that more than 728 million RP was spent on either Conqueror Karma skins or Conqueror ward skins. That’s enough to buy almost 800,000 Conqueror Karma skins.
There will be a similar event for Worlds later this year, as a new Championship skin will be released to contribute its sales to the Worlds prize pool. Last year, it was Championship Zed that bumped the Worlds prize pool to over $5 million with fan contributions.
This year, hopefully fans of the teams at Worlds will be feeling just as generous, because SK Telecom T1 will probably win, and they need all the money they can get to keep Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok around. It probably isn’t cheap to hold onto the world’s best player.
All jokes aside, revenue sharing like this is a great step for Riot to take with its professional competitive scene. In the future, it would be great to see more opportunities for revenue sharing from in-game items, like year-round team icons that give the teams a portion of the proceeds. More revenue sharing legitimizes playing League professionally as a stable career so more aspiring players and teams feel that their climb for greatness is worthwhile.
Fans clearly want to see their favorite teams succeed, or they wouldn’t have spent 728 million RP on a Karma skin. That, or they really like the skin.
