Riot Loosens League of Legends Community Event Restrictions, Opening Way for More Third-Party LoL Events

Riot Games has announced the loosening of several restrictions, making it easier for third parties to host League of Legends events in the future.

The new ‘LoL Esports Community Competition Guidelines‘ reduce restrictions regarding entry fees, sponsorships, prize pools, and spectator fees, but retain several noteworthy constraints on eligible sponsors for the events.

Riot has lowered the barrier to community competitions, stating that, “You’re free to organize League of Legends competitions at nearly any scale” following the announcement of the new guidelines.

The new rules allow third parties to run competitions which have no hard caps on entry fees, sponsorship revenue, prize pools, or spectator ticketing, making third-party events more feasible.

The new rules are intended to allow the majority of community events to take place without an explicit Riot approval. The LoL developers stated, “Our goal is to reduce the need for approvals while building a stronger connection with community organizers and creating more opportunities to support grassroots competition over time.”

Riot stated that they “Riot reserves the right to intervene, revoke permissions, or shut down any competition at our sole discretion if we believe it violates these guidelines, our values, or our policies.”

As such, they gave the following ‘Don’ts’ list as guidance:

• Don’t make misleading promises to players, teams, sponsors, or participants.
• Don’t mishandle prize money, entry fees, or sponsorship commitments.
• Don’t engage in abusive, exclusionary, fraudulent, or otherwise harmful behavior.

As part of the agreement, community event hosts must allow Riot the rights to “use, copy, modify, distribute, and create derivative works from your event content on a royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide basis, without compensation, approval, or attribution requirements.”