Can Anything Save League of Legends eSports?

Just a few years ago, eSports felt like the future.

Big teams were worth millions, arenas were packed, and League of Legends was leading the charge.

But now?

Many of those dreams have faded.

Teams are closing shop

eSports personalities are saying “it's time to pack up, and go home”

As 2025 comes to a close the same problems I discussed in my earlier piece this year have only gotten worse.

Riot’s “experiment” of trying to merge its North American, Latin America, and Brazilian leagues into one America’s super league was a flop.

They have decided to re-split the league in 2026 to try and reverse the downtrend but the damage has already been done.

In July, 100 Thieves, one of North America’s premier organizations announced it would leave League of Legends (LoL) entirely after the 2025 season, having already sold its franchise slot back to Riot.

This came after earlier departures of teams like TSM and CLG, meaning only four of the original ten LCS franchises remained in the region. Even those that initially stayed in LTA have downsized or reorganized drastically.

Over in China (LPL) the situation is not much better.

The once-mighty Royal Never Give Up (RNG), multiple-time domestic champions and a former Worlds contender, collapsed in mid-2025 amid performance and finacial issues.

RNG failed to escape the LPL’s new relegation format and withdrew from all LoL competition after being dropped to the secondary LDL league, disbanding its main and academy teams.

Former World Champion FunPlus Phoenix (FPX) has also announced they will exit the LPL before 2026; FPX reportedly attempted to withdraw a year earlier but had to wait due to league limits on annual departures. If confirmed, RNG and FPX’s exits would leave the LPL with only 14 teams next season.

Notably, LPL officials have had to intervene to help recover unpaid player wages amid team financial struggles, underscoring how dire the situation has become for struggling orgs.

Other esports leagues have fared no better.

Activision-Blizzard’s ambitious Overwatch League officially shut down in late 2023 after teams voted to dissolve the franchise model; each owner accepted a ~$6 million severance to exit.

The Call of Duty League has likewise seen waning interest and reports of a “bleak” outlook.

In short, the team exodus isn’t isolated to one game or region, but the broader eSports industry contracting after years of unsustainable spending.

Behind these withdrawals lies a fundamental tension: game publishers are focused on growing their games and viewership for their leagues, while teams struggle to find sustainable revenue. Teams essentially functioned as marketing arms for the publisher’s benefit, without a viable business model of their own.

Riot Games acknowledged that their original LoL franchising model from 2018 – where teams paid ~$10M for a slot and shared in league sponsorship/media revenue – was not working. As Riot’s President of Esports John Needham explained, “teams had abundant venture funding to overspend at first, but “over time, access to capital became limited, revenue growth didn’t catch up to cost growth, and team cash reserves dried up.”

In other words, the promised boom never arrived to cover ballooning player salaries and expenses. This was particularly a problem with North American teams that overpaid for international players that failed at delivering international results and additional revenue to the teams.

Another under-discussed component is how important international success is for a “new” sport to take hold in America. I see parallels in how Men’s soccer has failed to catch on in the US, given the lack of World Cup success, and how League of Legends has fallen apart in the US.

Riot’s plan to save its leagues via a new partnership model called the Global Revenue Pool.

This new Global Revenue Pool from digital item sales (e.g. team-branded skins, event passes) and allocates 50% of it equally to teams, with additional “competitive” and “fandom” shares rewarding top performances and fan engagement.

This shifts the model away from over-reliance on fickle sponsor dollars toward game-related monetization that allows the publisher and teams to grow together. Riot also recently allowed teams to have betting sponsors, but most importantly these betting sponsors are not allowed to advertise during competitions.

These changes come too late though for many teams who have suffered years of losses. Team owners have previously complained privately that Riot’s interests and their’s don’t align, but another owner I spoke with suggested the problem lies mostly with owners overinflating salaries without a clear path to profitability.

One key difference between traditional sports and eSports is broadcast rights or the lack thereof. Most eSports stream for free online which means teams don’t get any broadcast fees unlike traditional sports. Tencent, which owns Riot, solution to this for their own Honor of Kings game is simply to heavily subsidize the league and treat it as a marketing outlet.

Given the lack of publisher support, many orgs have tried pivoting to content creation and branding to survive, but this hasn’t proven effective. Being a “lifestyle and influencer” brand (selling merch, producing YouTube content, signing streamers) can generate buzz, yet it hasn’t closed the revenue gap from operating pro teams.

100 Thieves, for instance, built a massive lifestyle brand and content stable, yet still found fielding a Tier-1 LoL team unsustainable without continued investor infusion.

Other famous eSports brands like FaZe Clan, thought they had a different solution, go public. The team went public through a SPAC but was taken private in 2024 after a horrendous performance as a public company.

The harsh reality is that esports teams still struggle to monetize fans in a way traditional sports teams do. As one analysis noted, esports fans are often “reluctant to spend more on an activity that is essentially free to watch,” leaving teams “woefully unprofitable”.

Until that changes, team owners should consider looking for the exit.

Viewership for eSports events is another challenging situation. While global interest in marquee events is as high as ever, regional events have struggled.

The recent League of Legends World Championship set new records for viewership for its finals and semi-finals, but the on seen attendance in Chengdu was underwhelming. Talking with people in Chengdu there was a sense they would watch the finals as “something to do” but were not as interested in the games as they were before. If anything, the most interesting thing was the Durex Condom ad.

The situation is even worse within the regional leagues. North America’s LTA (the merged Americas league) suffered steep declines from the already-diminished numbers of previous years. LTA North 2025 averaged only ~80,000 concurrent viewers (with a 228k peak in Split 2), down ~34% in average viewership from LCS Spring 2024 (which averaged ~120k).

In fact, by Split 3 the English broadcast viewership had cratered to roughly half of the previous year’s levels. It even fell below the viewership of some smaller regions.

Fans’ discontent with the LCS->LTA rebrand likely didn’t help, nor did losing legacy brands like TSM/CLG/100T. The result: North America is now the lowest-viewed major region for League of Legends esports, a stunning fall from pulling six-figure audiences regularly just a few years ago.

Europe’s LEC has fared somewhat better but still faced stagnation in 2024-25, with minor viewership dips reported. By contrast, South Korea’s LCK is thriving after a 2024 format overhaul. The LCK introduced an expanded “unified season” format in 2024-25 and saw its highest viewership ever in 2025 – averaging 634,000 AMA (up 42% YoY) and over 200k domestic Korean viewers per match. South Korea created eSports at scale and it is not surprising there league continues to grow with the region winning a majority of the international championships.

Riot credited the LCK’s growth to an improved competitive structure and embracing co-streaming in China and Vietnam. This suggests that compelling formats and local engagement can still boost a league, at least where a deep fan culture exists.

In China, LoL viewership remains large domestically, with millions tuning in for LPL matches, but there are signs of plateauing interest and competition from other games. League of Legends and Counter Strike both benefited from South Korea and China’s Cyber Cafe culture. Post-Covid many of these have started to close for a variety of reasons which I pay explore in an upcoming piece. For the gaming side at least, much of that interest is shifting to mobile platforms. While Riot’s Wild Rift hasn’t seen similar levels of success Honor of King is a different story.

If League of Legends is navigating an “eSports winter,” Tencent’s mobile MOBA Honor of Kings is in a different season entirely. In China, Honor of Kings has become a cultural phenomenon, and its eSports ecosystem (King Pro League or KPL) is lavishly supported.

In late 2024, the KPL Grand Finals boasted a ¥70M (~$10M USD) prize pool – making it the richest single esports tournament of the year.

The recent 2025 KPL Grand Finals in Beijing then shattered records: it set a Guinness World Record for the largest live esports audience, packing the 68,000-seat Stadium to capacity. The event’s prize purse (~$9.8M) and live spectacle eclipsed League’s Worlds, underlining Tencent’s willingness to pour resources into eSports as both entertainment and promotion for the core game.

Top Honor of Kings teams are reaping the rewards directly. Reigning KPL champions AG Super Play have earned over $15 million in prize winnings across recent Honor of Kings tournaments.

KPL is also flush with sponsors ranging from tech firms to consumer brands (PUMA apparel, Volkswagen’s auto division, Castrol, etc.), reflecting a strong commercial interest in reaching its massive young audience.

While Honor of Kings’ global (Western) viewership is tiny ~119k concurrent viewers, within China it dominates, indicating a thriving local ecosystem.

The comparison between LoL and HoK highlights different approaches. Riot’s LoL eSports grew more organically and globally, but now finds its team infrastructure strained by economics. Tencent, on the other hand, directly underwrites HoK esports with huge prizes and integrates it deeply into China’s mobile-first culture. It’s arguably easier for HoK teams to be sustainable when the publisher pumps money in and the game’s revenue (HoK is the world’s top-grossing mobile game) can cross-subsidize the competitive scene.

Meanwhile, LoL teams have until recently been largely left to fend for themselves financially. There is also a cultural element at play: Chinese fans fill stadiums for HoK, a game many play daily on their phones, whereas getting NA fans to consistently attend LoL events or spend on merch has proven challenging.

In essence, HoK’s success doesn’t negate LoL’s value as a global eSport, but it does cast doubt on the longterm prospects of Riot’s model. It also suggests that esports ecosystems can thrive if publisher, teams, and sponsors are tightly aligned – something Riot is now scrambling to replicate with its new revenue-sharing plan.

Nine months on from early 2025, when I last wrote about the state of Legend of Legends, the esports landscape has only gotten more worse. The lofty dreams of 2018’s boom have been tempered by layoffs, downsizing, and a retreat from expansion. Riot’s recent moves (revenue sharing, relaxed sponsor rules, format tweaks, even allowing betting sponsors in some regions) indicate a recognition that teams need a bigger piece of the pie to stick around. The question is whether these measures will stabilize the scene in 2026 or if the leagues continue their decline.

Fans, too, will play a role. Converting more viewers into paying supporters (through tickets, subscriptions, in-game purchases, or even bets) is crucial. Some proposals floating around include developing local team hubs or watch bars (to build regional pride akin to traditional sports), and embracing regulated esports betting to drive engagement, though the latter comes with its own challenges.

On the content side, leagues like the LCS may need to rediscover a serious competitive tone to bring back lapsed fans who were turned off by gimmicky broadcasts. Essentially, rebuild the narrative and prestige so that the product feels worth investing time into again.

2025 has shown that the esports winter is going to get worse before it gets better. Yet there are still embers of hope: the game (League of Legends) remains hugely popular globally, and other scenes (Korea’s LCK or China’s mobile esports) prove that interest can be reignited with the right strategy. The coming year will be pivotal.

If Riot’s new financial model gains traction and teams can survive the interim, we may see a more sustainable ecosystem emerge. If not, more storied names will vanish, and LoL esports, at least in the West, will continue its slide into niche status.

The key will be adjusting expectations: the era of blank-check spending is over, but with prudent management and true partnership between publishers and teams, a leaner but stable esports scene can still emerge.

The next chapters will reveal whether League of Legends can level up outside the game itself, or whether the “2018 boom to 2025 bust” narrative becomes permanent history.