What Happened To Wild Rift Esports?

What happened to League of Legends: Wild Rift and the esports scene Riot Games tried to establish?

In today's video, we'll look at what happened to Wild Rift and how a game that was supposed to become the world's most popular mobile game failed to live up to its expectations.

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0:00 - Intro
0:36 - The next big esport?
2:06 - Wild Rift Icons Failure
4:12 - What went wrong with Wild Rift?
7:30 - Riot Games & Esports
7:57 - Where are we now?
8:57 - Outro

#esports

[Akshonmedia]

Do you think Riot Games will succeed with 2XKO?

[ghy_]

The biggest problem is that Riot tried to treat mobile esports the same like pc esports and not more like the FGC with open tournaments and large brackets. We tried applying for a tournament license in Wild Rift but the people in-charge took two months to reply and we were limited to like only eight teams for the tournament. While people did try to make tournaments without Riot's approval, Riot was quicker to shut these tournaments down rather than providing for grassroots.

In the Philippines, it is common for mayors, malls and schools to host their own tournaments in MLBB and it should have been the same in Wild Rift. However, Riot was too busy sterilizing their esport because they felt threatened that some city with their $100 prize pool was going to overshadow them.

[apollojustice]

So uh fun fact...

In India, Wild Rift has still not been released. Its been in 4 YEARS

[koshhi]

Its just a problem of coming too late, MLBB and other games have already taken over the South East Asian scene and nobody is willing to relearn and regrind everything that they could just have on MLBB.

[HellsDevilwildrift]

Came too late and messed up their Esports budget.

Recipe for failure

[onthedre]

Riot when the game they just released isn't immediately pulling them 10 Million views: 😰😰😢😢😢😢😢

[ChucktheSpicyChicken]

Fun fact: MLBB is the second most watched Esport, only behind PC LoL. WR stood no chance.

[chedieabella]

After reading comment, I think people aren't aware that "After fully acquiring Riot Games in 2015, Tencent asked them to turn League of Legends into a mobile title. However, Riot declined and claimed that the game could not be replicated on smartphones. Tencent then created their own mobile MOBA, Honor of Kings (with its international adaptation known as Arena of Valor)."

Riot itself gatekeeps its own game that's why it flopped. HoK wouldn't exist if Riot agreed to port it out for smartphones.

[darkmatter]

Because Riot has ZERO idea how the mobile gaming scene works... simple as. end of. Tencent literally asked them to make mobile league earlier, but they didnt wanna so AoV/HoK came in

[ah-ixzo]

As a former manager of a small esports team for wildrift here in the Philippines, it was supposed to be successful mostly when we were in the Covid era. We had a bunch of local tournaments and other tournaments that famous streamers hosted, but riot later shut down those tournaments due to the tournaments kind of being a hindrance to the tournaments that riot hosted. We were already gaining a huge amount of audience but riot stopped us. The viewer and audience problem is already expected since mlbb, aov, and other moba games are already here. But we were already trying to help riot to gain some audience for wildrift yet they stopped us until wildrift slowly faded and it's esports future shattered. There's still a small playerbase and a handful of teams of wildrift right now still waiting for another local tournament that anyone could host. until then, the future of wildrift esports will continue to fade which is quite dissapointing.

[redcomet]

I personally like Wild Rift more than actual league

[UtsukimiJerry]

To add on even further, Riot was also too busy trying to sue MLBB for the longest of time due to potential plagiarism in hoping that MLBB would shut down. They should have one-upped them during those period and fought for the APAC region.

The battle's already lost for Riot in grabbing the mobile market now.

[godsidian]

It was supposed to be on console too, I was hyped for that and then...no news about it. Like everyone forgot, it's a mobile game and that's it, like a Mandela effect

[eryalmario]

The problem is that wr esports didn't start from grassroots unlike lol esports.

If they did the same with lol:wr then they could've been a contender in the mobile games market.

Also all I want from that game is to move my map to the right because my dominante eye is on the right

[RazShape]

MLBB did hard marketing when they started. They were sponsoring influencers left and right. Funded thousands of giveaways and price money. I know this coz I once became one. Money was coming in crazy. In addition, their game runs on any device. By the time WR entered the mobile market, MLBB was already untouchable.

[dandydanker]

Wild rift is also is not phone specs friendly. you need like $300 phone to run it smoothly, while with Mobile Legends you can play it with $100 mobile phone perfectly fine. mind you most of SEA is developing country

[ChillingSurvivor]

I have more respect on moonton now than riot, moonton listen to it's player's demands via surveys and always try to advertise their game harder while riot only rely on its popularity exposure. Love how their ignorance and underestimation of mobile gaming in SEA backfired to them so bad, not only the hype died not even a month after release, no one talks nor hear about the loud mouths expecting it would kill mlbb, not even arcane could lift the game to the spotlight.

Take the L riot

[stonedtrooper]

I only played MLBB bcause I wasnt able to play LoL on pc anymore, but as soon as WIld Rift came out I switched, but for me what matters the most it's the lack of champions available on Wild Rift.

[vonflores]

Wildrift fails because they did not allow local tournaments. In the Ph many LoL players that are also MLBB players invested on making local tournaments but they ended up being stopped by riot games. They become very greedy and only want the tourny scene for themselves.

[alterdawn]

there was also the issue about riot not allowing local tournaments to be created, some content creators wanted to host a tournament but riot didn't allow them at all hence the lack of tournament scene in the locality.