Since Riot has been struggling to cutting cost of operating esports, (such as turning regional League tournaments into online)
the new partnership format was inevitable but it seems have upsides for all the parties.
Riot's perspective in reducing cost
In franchising era, the operation cost was too costly to maintain.
Riot was paying to run the dedicated studio and give subsidies for every partner teams relocated to host cities for almost the whole year.
Since the new format runs qualifiers online and the events, Riot now only need to invite few teams and pay for short time for renting venues.
Since most partner team have their own facilities in their home town, Riot no longer need to support all of these expenses.
Operating cost in host cities (LA/Berlin/Seoul) were too costly as well, making it difficult to run events in other sub-regions.
Now they can run events with regional partners, in a lot of cases this is going to be afforable, enabling more events while
getting more fan engagements in different regions.
Competitive perspective
Except for budget org or bottom feeder teams, most are going to be content with this change as well
While it was a pleasure to see top teams with different nationality go up against each other every week,
it was also a pain to see guarenteed bottom teams face each other in regular stage.
Since the new format makes everything into tournaments, we are not going to see these teams play through
for all the year and be able to watch better teams going through the tournament.
This is going to mean less stability for the players (team not qualifying for tournaments are going to change roster more often)
but there is going to be increased opportunities as there are going to be more teams from their region.
Team's perspective
- As mentioned above, more fan engagement in their region: except for really few occasions, the best they could do was hosting watch parties
- Minimum salary standard for franchise is no longer valid. They now can give player's salary based on their region since most teams won't be a Partnered team.
- Age restriction got lower, so more player pool
- No longer need to operate academy teams (most players would prefer competing as well)
- For majority of teams, increased import slot helps forming competitive roster (I see China getting really competitive with this change)
Any other insights are welcome
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