When it comes to building a fan base in esports, nothing is more valuable than winning. And in professional League of Legends, teams across the globe have proven that their fan bases can grow exponentially every time they lift a trophy. Legacy organizations like T1, G2 Esports, and Team Liquid didn’t get their droves of fans by consistently sitting in the middle of their leagues’ tables.
This past weekend, several LCS owners spoke to members of the press prior to the league’s Summer Finals, and discussed the importance of building fandom through championships, not content.
The conversation was sparked by a quote from streamer turned LoL team owner Disguised Toast, who lambasted LCS organizations for falling behind the curve in the content department in an interview last week with Dexerto. “Traditional LCS orgs don’t really understand how to create content,” Toast told Dexerto. “They’re not entertaining, and players are swapped around every year, so there’s no storyline. And what you end up with is just kind of… nothing. No investment, no storyline, and no emotional investment from fans, and it’s not fun to watch in that scenario.”
When asked about these remarks, LCS owners Jack Etienne (Cloud9) and Steve Arhancet (Team Liquid) doubled down on their dedication to putting the best team on the stage possible, without sacrificing any of that goal in favor of a stream of content.
“A lot of our focus these days has really just been to be competitively as good as we can be, and that has been our focus and pathway to success,” Etienne said. “We are not entertainers, straight up.”
While LCS owners recognize they’re in the entertainment industry, they also believe that nothing is more entertaining than winning.
Even with yesterday’s loss in mind, Cloud9 have won three of the last six LCS titles, with at least one title in each of the last four seasons. Before Cloud9 won their second-ever LCS title in 2020, Team Liquid had just won four in a row.
“You have to ask yourself ‘are you building a content creation team or are you building a team to win a championship?,’” Liquid owner Steve Arhancet said. “If your priority lies with winning a championship, then you pick the best players possible. Period. End of story.”
Arhancet specifically mentioned that he didn’t sign players like Bjergsen or Doublelift because they brought prospects of content to the organization, but instead because they were the best available free agents at the time they joined his team. When speaking on his strategy for developing his organization’s image in the current market, Arhancet said that he wouldn’t like to rely on “a creator, fatty content, or the superficial validation or clickbaity whatever that’s happening on YouTube.”
In the case of Disguised Toast, a creator with a multi-million subscriber base on YouTube, he’s already got a leg up in the content field. To round out the competitive half, his team, Disguised, just won the North American Challengers League, strengthening his brand both on the stage and off it. Still, he faces an uphill battle, as winning a tier-two tournament can only grab so many eyeballs on your product, and securing a spot in a league with limited franchise slots is a difficult gamble.
Related: Riot announces ‘first-of-its-kind’ LoL NA Legends Invitational with Disguised Toast as host
At yesterday’s press conference, Toast even cited former players like Arhancet, as well as TSM owner Andy Dinh—both of whom played professional LoL briefly before transitioning into full-time owner roles—as blueprints for why community-enriched organizations can get in on the ground floor and take off.
“Content creator orgs were kind of the originators,” Toast said. “It’s been so long that people forget that in NA, there were a lot of content creator orgs, but if you look outside of NA right now you have Ibai (KOI), Bruno with LOUD … it’s just because they are more dialed in in terms of building a story, so the formula has worked for people outside of NA.”
Whether or not that formula can work in North America alongside teams that have historically put winning first and content second is still yet to be seen—but for a streamer/tier-two owner to get a place on a panel alongside the top brass of the LCS is a sign that it just might.
Should DSG actually find itself on the LCS stage next year, it could be enough to prove that the entertainers have just as much of a right to compete as the competitors.
