Play for Power: The LCS Lockout Battle Begins

Photo by Attentie Attentie on Unsplash

On Sunday, League of Legends Championship (LCS) players—encouraged by the LCS Players Association (NALCSPA)—voted to stage a walkout at the start of the Summer Split (which was set to start on Thursday) in protest over Riot Games’ decision to allow franchised teams to abandon their North American Challenger League (NACL) teams—in traditional professional sports leagues, one might call them “farm teams” or the “minor leagues.”

Prior to this policy change, franchised teams were given a stipend (the NALCSPA claims $3M USD, but teams we spoke to said it’s more like $2M) and a portion of it was to be used to field an NACL team. With that requirement removed, only three of the ten franchised LCS teams announced that they would continue to operate an NACL team—the impetus for this entire situation.

In addition to announcing the decision by LCS players to walk out, the NALCSPA released a list of demands for Riot (you can see those demands in our previous reporting, we’re not going to rehash them here).

Following that, stories from unknown sources began circulating that Riot was going to lift the ranking requirements for players so that teams could hire temporary replacement players (which the LCSPA referred to as “scabs” in a statement, a pejorative for someone who crosses a picket line to take a striking worker’s job) to play at the start of the season on Thursday.

On May 30, a statement attributed to Riot Games Global Head of Esports Naz Aletaha rejected those demands point-by-point, but also announced that the company would delay the start of the summer competition for two weeks to give all parties involved (teams, players, the players association, and Riot) time to talk and negotiate some sort of compromise.

While the delay was somewhat conciliatory, Aletaha also used some tough language to preview what could happen if the situation goes beyond a couple of weeks: if a compromise can’t be found, Riot would be willing to cancel the rest of the 2023 season and take away North America’s place at Worlds:

“Delaying beyond the two-week window would make it nearly impossible to run a legitimate competition, and in that case, we would be prepared to cancel the entire LCS summer season. Carrying this forward, if the LCS summer season is canceled, this will also eliminate LCS teams qualifying for 2023 Worlds. I want to be clear: That is not an outcome we’d want, but it’s unfortunately the reality of ensuring we run a fair, competitive global system.”

But from what we understand, while Riot Global is publicly flexing its muscles and showing that it does in fact have an immense amount of power in this situation (it does, after all, own both the league and the game and can do whatever it wants at the end of the day), there’s probably a reason why this statement wasn’t attributed to someone from Riot Games North America or even the LCS: they sincerely want to negotiate a solution if it is possible.

Certainly, the LCS, team owners who have invested considerable resources–time and money—into the league in 2023, and even the players want to find some sort of compromise and get back to competing.

Earlier this week, TEA spoke to LCSPA Executive Director Phil Aram and asked him some hard questions about the situation that his players’ association started. From what we understand—as of this writing—negotiations are ongoing and Aram has paused talking to the media to focus on working with Riot, players, and team owners to begin hammering out some sort of compromise.

We pressed Aram really hard on two important questions: why the LCSPA isn’t a union already and what would be a dealbreaker for players that would cause a stalemate in negotiations.

The question about being a union is an important one because the LCSPA is a players’ association, and not a union, which means it does not provide some of the protections being a union gives to workers under state and federal law—the public discourse about “scabs” and “collective bargaining” in this particular situation has muddied the waters quite a bit as well. Aram acknowledges that the LCSPA is not a union, and until this moment in its history didn’t need to be one to be an effective advocate for players’ rights.

“The reality is action for forming a labor organization is driven by pain, and—by and large—players have had good opportunities; It’s a competitive labor market, they have a third-party in Riot who has liability concerns and other things that help to motivate them to make the teams follow the law. It’s been a quality experience overall for players. There are downsides, but the net benefits outweighed unionization and there wasn’t enough pain in the blood of the workers to go that route. This is the first real step in that direction because a walkout is the kind of thing that lets you educate people.”

Aram went on to say that players are more engaged than ever and have a desire to learn about the harms that could befall them without the protection of being organized.

“So they obviously came to the conclusion that a walkout was in their best interest and that they could exercise that collective power, and they’re starting to understand how powerful that is to stand up to a company as large as Riot Games and to say, ‘you can’t play this game without us.’ That’s power.

“I think they’ve now seen and understand, and the next step would be unionization; we’re working with labor attorneys to figure out what that looks like and it’ll be an ongoing conversation with the players to determine if they want to take that next step. But it’s also a complicated one—no one’s ever tried to unionize against the developer who owns the sport or the people who own the football.“

We also asked about the list of demands the LCSPA released earlier in the week. Sources we spoke to earlier in the week claimed that the PA created these demands without players in the room—those people that voted to stage a walkout—in the room.

“In the timeframe we had—and as is usually the case—we relied on the leadership [the Executive Committee all players elected to make these kinds of decisions—more details here] for initial sourcing of core stuff. It’s not a practical solution to have 50 people come together to work out an initial list of causes and concerns. We always talk to our players about the fact that the list (and we talked to Riot when we disclosed it to them) was a values-based list of things that we felt reflected the values that were missed in their decision.”

He added that this list that was inevitably released to the public was seen by players and Riot prior to publication to give all parties a chance to weigh in on what they felt was right or wrong about the LCSPA’s priorities.

During our conversation, Aram acknowledged that they don’t expect to have all those demands met and some concessions will have to be made by all parties to hammer out a compromise and get the LCS back on track.

While Aram declined to talk about what would be a dealbreaker for players (probably because all parties are negotiating right now and he wants to lower the temperature), we believe that one concession players will not make is on the NACL in its current state after Riot’s decision; after all, it is the whole reason players voted to walk out in the first place.

Editor’s note: TEA reached out to Riot Games Sunday evening following the player vote to walkout, but the company instead pointed us to its official statement later in the week.