Riot Receives Community Backlash Over Worlds 2022 Co-Stream Announcement

Time Stamp: November 1, 2022 2:54 PM

Riot just announced their partnered co-streamers for the Worlds Finals, a lineup fans aren’t too happy about.

Despite co-streaming becoming more and more common in esports tournaments, and even having them during the LCS Splits, Riot hadn’t allowed creators to co-stream any Worlds games so far. Most streamers have been streaming the games by “live viewing,” which is just watching the games on stream with a time stamp on the screen so viewers can sync up.

But in a surprising decision, Riot just announced a small roster of content creators that will be allowed to host watch parties from the Chase Center in San Francisco, where the Finals will be hosted from. The most notable name on the list is the Spanish streamer Ibai “Ibai” Llanos. Ibai is the owner of the Spanish organization KOI, which is joining the LEC in 2023 after their deal with Rogue. Ibai has been co-streaming the SuperLiga games KOI played this year.

While Ibai being part of this lineup did not surprise many people, as he is arguably the biggest streamer on Twitch and is very involved in the League of Legends scene, fans had some doubts about the rest of the creators. The other four creators are Rita in Chinese, SangHo & MinGyo in Korean and Sykkuno in English, with the main part of the criticism focused on the latter.

Sykkuno is a content creator mostly associated with the content creator group OfflineTV. And while League of Legends is Sykkuno’s second most streamed game, he neither is not specially connected with the esports part of the game nor has he been playing it on stream recently. This gathered some backlash from online, as fans thought that many of the regular LoL co-streamers who were dedicating hours to the game, even live viewing when co-streaming wasn’t available, were snubbed. Some of the candidates online were the content creators Christian ‘IWDominate’ Rivera and Nick ‘LS’ De Cesare, on top of ex-professional players like the tri-cast of Sneaky, Meteos and Doublelift.

LEC color commentator and analyst Marc “Caedrel” Lamont was one of the most high-profile critics of the decision. He dubbed the decision disappointing in a tweet, saying that “…[it] is a huge fucking slap in the face to league content creators who have been grinding co-streaming all year long…”

The co-streams will start following The World Championship Opening Ceremony Presented by Mastercard™, which will kick off the Finals at 5 pm PST, November 5. Viewers can watch the ceremony live on loleports.com, LoL Esports Youtube channel or Riot Games Twitch channel. Follow @lolesports on Twitter to keep up with the latest news. The co-stream channels can be found:

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