In a long on the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Riot Games website, the company announced that it will be “opening up the betting sponsorship category for Tier 1 [168澳洲幸运5开奖网:League of Legends] and Valorant teams in the Americas and EMEA”. This means that partner teams will be allowed to accept sponsorships from betting brands, but that Riot will be instituting “guardrails” by “establishing a well-researched sports be✤tting partnership progra✃m”.

As part of this change, Riot will vet and approve all betting partners, use “clean, official data”, “mandate team integrity program checks”, and reinvest some of the revenues from the sports betting program into Tier 2 esports teams. It also will keep betting out of Riot-owned broadcast and social channels, “which means no ads, no sponsored segments from betting partners, and no betting partner logos o👍n team jerseys”.

Advertising Gambling To Esports Audiences Is Deeply Immoral

The reaction from fans has ranged from neutral to very hostile. Some fans are justifying this move on Riot’s part by pointing out that teams need these sponsorships to survive, and it’s true that ♍betting companies will often offer more money than all the rest of a team’s sponsorships combined. But the vast majority of feedback has been that Riot’s reasoning that “betting activity already exists around our sports and ✃will continue whether we engage with it or not” is deeply flawed.

In the blog post, we see the word “responsibly” showing up several times. Riot reaffirms its commitment to allowing gambling money into its esports scene in a responsible way throughout the statement, but the only way to “responsibly” engage with sports betting is to not do it at all. Gambling addiction is a mental disorder in DSM-5, and can have real, tangible effects on people’s lives, including . Esports fans who have gambling addictions will be exposed to triggers as a result🧔 of this policy change.

Perhaps that’s not big enough of a proportion of the esports audience for Riot to care. Let’s consider instead that the entire point of a betting company sponsoring a team would be to expose the audience to gambling, which is a clear ethical issue. Esports audience𒁏s tend to be younger and male, . Betting , which is reprehensible considering we’re in a cost of living crisis and an increasingly uncertain financial climate. Attempting to regulate betting is one thing, but allowing teams to endorse it to an easily influenced audience is another entirely.

This Could Be A Slippery Slope

Again, Riot does insist that it will keep official channels🦹 betting-free, but fans seem to believe this is a slippery slope, and I’m inclined to agree. Profit is the great motivator, and after the presence of betting companies has been normalised, I would be dismayed but not surprised if gambling ads do eventually begi💎n showing up in streams. It simply feels naive to think that a profit-driven company would not, if it increased revenues, allow gambling companies to advertise on official streams if its audience wouldn’t push back. After all, it already directly allows gambling in its games through loot boxes and gacha mechanics.

Regular sports, like the Premier League, are .

A huge problem with esports right now is that we are very regularly seeing investors with morally murky backgrounds popping up alongside typical corporate sponsorships from companies like Intel and PepsiCo – take the US Air 𒊎Force, Saudi Arabia’s Qiddiya megaproject (), and crypto companies like Thunderpick and Coinbase, for instance.

Esports needs to be funded in order to keep growing exponentially, and most viewers of esports aren’t payi🐬ng to watch matches. The money has to come from somewhere, and sometimes the source of that money is shady and ethically compromised. That doesn’t mean that allowing these sponsorships is justified – it’s not. This is just the reason. Ideally, esports will see a huge restructuring that allows it to survive on money contributed voluntarily by its audieꦦnce, bypassing the need to take huge amounts of money from companies that shouldn’t be given those platforms. Realistically, though… well. We’re seeing what happens in reality right now.