We were one of the first business entities in the world to take on the task of testing professional competition within Riot Games' new mode. We now have two editions of Arena tournaments in League of Legends to our credit, and both were a huge success.
The organization of tournaments still remains one of the most popular ways of getting people interested in the esports field. However, the seemingly easy task of running a tournament can cause many problems — an unattractive format, poorly chosen participants or ineffective event promotion. These are just a few examples of serious obstacles that can stand in the way of success. So how do you approach the subject with a fresh mindset? This is the question we asked ourselves when we started putting up together the second edition of Arena Cup, a competition between influencers of the League of Legends world in the seasonal Arena mode.
HOW TO TOP THE SUCCESS OF THE FIRST EDITION?
The first edition of the event was a great success in terms of viewership results, but ambitious clients like to raise the bar higher. However, we knew that, with the target KPI’s set with Riot Games, it would be difficult for us to prove satisfactory results if we simply replicated the existing format. Being aware of how good the previous results were and the limited audience pool in Poland, we concluded that we had to go international.
INTERNATIONAL STARS
We invited well-known influencers, creators and professional gamers from all over Europe to participate in the tournament. The guest list included stars of the calibre of: Jankos, Trymbi, Puki Style, Nemesis, Broxah, Santorin and Thebausffs, among others. When selecting the participants, we had one main criterion — we wanted an equal competition at a high level to avoid a situation in which one team clearly stands out from the rest in terms of skill level. We knew that if the participants enjoyed the competition, they would present their best to the audience. Especially that there was a lot to fight for — the Arena Cup 2 prize pool amounted to PLN 40,000.
As in the case of the first edition of Arena Cup, the event was broadcast not only on Riot Games Polska channels, but also directly on the participants channels. This symbiotic relationship in terms of coverage helped us not only to encourage professional streamers and creators to take part in the event, but also significantly increased the viewership. This way, we were able to achieve satisfactory results for the client and ourselves, which we can again consider a success — this time internationally.
