Giant Bomb Presents: Thou Shalt Not Stream (The Competition)

@extomar said:

Either I'm misunderstanding you or you are highly misinformed.

The creator and maintainer of Dota both work at Valve and have for several years. The one who made the original map and the name, Eul. And the person who has maintained it for the past 7 years, icefrog.

And Valve owns the rights to all the trademarks, not just "Dota 2". http://www.valvesoftware.com/trademarkguidelines.html

A couple things that are worth noting -

Most of the players in the NA LCS are making about $20K a year (assuming you don't win the big end of season jackpot, and you aren't if you're a NA team) Their housing is paid for, but they have to live close enough to LA to show up in person and play matches at least once a week.

The majority of these players are college age, and are either putting off or giving up college education to play professionally. Most of these players won't make it past 30 or so because as reaction times decay you stop being able to compete at a high enough level to be professional. There's really no future in the industry other than possibly becoming a commentator or owning/running teams/sites like Solomid.net and Curse.

The players aren't actually paid by Riot to stream, they are paid to compete in the LCS tournament, which they have had to compete against other teams to win a spot in, and then beat another team in the LCS tournament to relegate them out.
The League of Legends queues for pro level players can be extraordinarily long, especially at non-peak hours. Some of these players actually make more money for themselves through stream ads and subscriptions than their League salary, and people will simply stop watching your stream if there's big 20-30 minute breaks where nothing is happening. That's the primary reason why short games like Hearthstone have taken over (that and Blizzard handing out beta keys to anyone with an audience).

I think the decision they finally ended up with was the right one, taking money from other companies to stream something is pretty iffy, unless they fix the monster queue times for high elo players (assuming that's even possible without wrecking the integrity of matchmaking) it just seems bullyish to force some of these players to jeopardize their actual primary source of income.

Good reportin', Scoops. Never had a problem with Riot's policy myself, seemed reasonable, especially given players had been offered money to stream other games before (while still listed under League on the Twitch.tv page.)

@hugplx said:

If you look at the timeline and the contract it's quite clear that Riot's statement is just an excuse for their actions. People forget that Riot also released a statement 'before' they claimed this was due to other game companies buying their players.

What idiot would draw up these rules if your goal is to stop your players from being used as billboards for other games? They mention specific games even, so companies could still buy out the players just not for the games on that list.

If their goal was what they claimed it to be from the start then they would have just said in their contracts that they cannot accept any sponsorship or gifts (like beta keys) from other game companies. But that wasn't their main concern, their main concern is Blizzard and Valve.

And I have no problem with those rules, the players are Riot employees after all.

Once again Patrick, awesome reporting.

I know Scoops probably means Google Talk or Hangouts or whatever, but it's funny to think of his being the last user of AOL Instant Messenger. That's some Pony Express shit!
Great content, by the way!

I'm no esports expert, but the policy itself (other than for random games like Fat Princess or Hearthstone) seemed pretty reasonable. But the way they were doing it seemed super shady and weird, so I get the backlash.

But hey, they've reversed it, so whatever.

Lots of haters that don't understand contract law. If you're being paid by Riot, as an employee, to promote their products, then they are perfectly within their rights to enforce that directive.

Look, these people signed a contract. It's pretty straightforward.

@patrickklepek So, can we call you Pat from now on?

That was way better than I was thinking. Awesome work Scoops. Would be nice to see more e-sports stuff on Giant Bomb.

Hmm, I'm not misinformed. The issue is that Riot was moving on securing the rights to trademarks and starting to use them as justification for some of their actions against sites and groups. Meanwhile icefrog was talking to Valve and it appeared they were going to pull the trigger rebuilding Dota on Source. Was Riot making these moves because of Valve or to silence critics? It is hard to tell but either way Blizzard had to act or either would run away with the biggest innovation in the genre since Warcraft.

It is questionable whether or not Blizzard would have won against Valve since it was settled and agreements were made. Blizzard definitely had the name and TOS on their side while Valve had the creator on their side. What shook out is this is that Valve can use "Dota 2" and Dota heroes and Blizzard can make their own game but they also have legitimate IP claims.

So Valve wins since they can claim "the sequel to Dota" and more importantly the heroes designs and parameters. Blizzard didn't win but they also didn't lose because they are now free and clear to create their own MOBA that can behave a lot like Dota without flak from Valve along with the promise of honoring their IP claims that are lingering from legacy. On the other hand, Riot gets nothing and in fact loses out to any remaining claims.

So yeah, Riot may have a real rivalry with Valve, Riot also has a big bone to pick Blizzard. They basically took one of the biggest trademarks in the industry away from them and gave it to their biggest rival.

I googled and this was the first thing I found: This is a link, yo.

I don't know if it's true and don't care too much, but from what I gather, Pendragon and Guinsoo, two Riot employees who worked on DotA, filed the trademark claim in order to keep the game in the hands of the community. Riot at large was not involved.

I know there's the idea that there is some sort of bloody feud between Riot and Valve over the MOBA genre, but from my experience, both companies treat each other and their fanbases with utmost respect.

Riot houses and pays them to play video games for a living. I wouldn't really call that 'sacrifice'. I call that 'awesome'.

Good to get someone with e-sports chops to show some insight. Liking these short interviews on specific themes, big or small.

@patrickklepek patrick in your interviews I don't know if it's on purpose to make sure you don't talk over people but your audio on your mic is always so quiet!

Love all your interviews though brother, this one was interesting, especially with a lot of the streaming of games being a thing now.

This has nothing to do with people not understanding contract law. People are discussing if this is fair for the players and the audience, and the majority (or at least a loud minority) didn't think it was. So they demanded that Riot changed the clause. Everyone understand that Riot was well within their right to do this, but the discussion was about wheter or not they should do it.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, and you should at least explain it to the audience when it would soon be very obvious that something was going on. Riot failed at this.

I've never played LoL or watched a stream, so I don't care either way. I just think your comment was attacking a point no one disagreed with.

fuck slasher

As someone that doesn't play League, I always had this vague impression of Riot being a cool developer. Having learned more about them (especially in the last year) seems like not so much.