Brands

Eight Esports World Cup Sponsors Not Shown in Chinese Broadcasts

Published by

Hongyu Chen

2 months ago

Esports Word Cup sponosrs not shown in Chinese broadcasts of League of Legends competitions

The seven-day Esports World Cup (EWC) League of Legends competition in Riyadh concluded on July 7, but The Esports Advocate has learned that its Chinese broadcasts did not include eight EWC sponsors, including Brans, KitKat, LG UltraGear, Adidas, Qiddiya, Dr. Sulaiman AL Habib Medical Group, Pepsi, and Sony during the competitions. Only Saudi Arabia telecom company STC Group was featured at the highlight of League of Legends competitions. The broadcasts outside of Mainland China such as Twitch showed the sponsor logos during the broadcasting.

Broadcasts outside of China vs Chinese broadcasts – Kuaishou, Huya, DouYu and Bilibili

The Esports Advocate has reached out to the Chinese broadcasting operator VSPO and China’s League of Legends esports operator TJ Sports for more details behind this and will update the story if we receive a reply.

While we do not have specific details, it was likely due to a conflict of interests or miscommunication between Riot Games/Tencent and EWC. It’s also possible that the EWC sponsorship deals do not include the Mainland China market. It should be noted that the EWC Dota 2 competition does not have a local Chinese broadcasting production, and the Chinese Dota 2 streamers used direct English signals from the EWC Twitch channel to the Chinese partnering streaming platforms, including Kuaishou Huya, DouYu, and Bilibili. In other words, only EWC League of Legends competitions appear to have skipped displaying sponsors at the moment. It’s not clear whether the further esports titles will be affected.

According to esports data company Esports Charts, the EWC League of Legends grand final, South Korea’s T1 Entertainment & Sports (T1) vs China’s TOP Esports (TES) surpassed 1.1M peak viewers, and has become one of the most popular matches for EWC. Though the data excludes the viewership from Mainland China, The missing brand logo of EWC sponsors and partners in China is a big brand exposure loss.

Editor’s note: The Esports Advocate has learned that not just Chinese broadcasts, but the Vietnamese, French, and Arabic broadcasts did not include EWC sponsor branding.

Vietnamese broadcast missing EWC sponsor branding.

Hongyu Chen

Hongyu "Eddie" Chen serves as conduit from China to the rest of global esports scene as the only Chinese journalist living in China while writing for Western media outlets. For the last four years Eddie served as the China esports correspondent for The Esports Observer and Sports Business Journal. He is a bilingual graduate of MA Business and Marketing and a certified BEng Electronic and Communication Engineer.