At Ambitious League of Legends World Championship, Riot Games Continues to Blaze At-Home-Production Trail

At Ambitious League of Legends World Championship, Riot Games Continues to Blaze At-Home-Production Trail Both world and English-language feeds were produced from Los Angeles studio By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor

Monday, November 5, 2018 - 6:52 pm

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Riot Games' largest esports production of 2018 came to its epic finale last weekend with the League of Legends (LoL) World Championship Final in Incheon, South Korea. Always one of the most watched live esports shows each year, Riot Games outdid itself once again in terms of technology. Having been deployed o create a virtual dragon flying through Beijing National Stadium last year, AR was factored into this year's Opening Ceremony at Incheon Munhak Stadium, allowing in-game band K/DA to be virtually inserted onstage into the opening musical performance alongside Madison Beer, Miyeon and Soyeon of (G)I-DLE, and Jaira Burns.

Of course, the Opening Ceremony's K/DA in AR was just the first in a parade of cutting-edge technologies and production workflows deployed by Riot Games to serve the massive audience tuning into the LoL World Championship Final. Most notably, Riot Games continued to push the at-home-production envelope at this year's Worlds, producing both the world-feed show and the English-language show from its studio in Los Angeles and reducing the number of mobile units onsite from four in 2017 to zero this year.

We believe a reliable at-home production strategy is integral to grow globally and maintain long-term sustainability, says Mitch Rosenthal, head of production and operations, Riot Games. Now hosting an event in Europe or Asia or North America doesn't force us into region-specific tradeoffs and allows all of our shows to hit the high bar our players and fans deserve.

Upping the At-Home Ante: World Feed Produced in L.A.

Over the past four-plus years, Riot has been at the forefront of at-home production and continues to leverage its Riot Direct network (the ISP used to service all LoL gameplay) to efficiently send feeds from tournament remotes to its Los Angeles production facility. Riot sources local ISPs for the last mile to connect the closest Riot Direct ingest point. During the Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) from Paris in May, the company successfully transmitted 34 live sources in 1080p60 from Paris to L.A. (with a latency of just 175 ms) over a 1-Gbps pipe.

Riot Games' MCR in Incheon (shown here) was heavily connected to its LA production facility as part of the at-home production workflow

Reducing four [production] trucks onsite to zero in a single year has been an incredible achievement for us, says Rosenthal. Similarly, bringing bandwidth [to deliver video/audio feeds back home] down to 1-GB allows us to do four complete productions offsite. Over the course of the last 18 months, we have been working hard to accomplish this goal, and it's gratifying to see us going to a modified flypack and truly take advantage of our remote capabilities. We will continue to look to push the envelope and reduce our footprint as much as we can.

At the MSI, Riot used its English-language feed as the main program and produced a mix-minus version as an output for the world feed so that other regions could share the resource. However, in Korea, for the first time, Riot used the world feed as its baseline, with the English-language show serving as a client of the world feed, increasing the value of the world feed for all regions. Although Riot produced more content in Los Angeles (both the world feed and the English-language feed), it was still able to reduce its transmission needs from a 10-Gbps pipe at last year's Worlds to less than 2-Gbps this year.

We're always looking at improving this [at-home workflow] for everyone, says Rosenthal. MSI was our first test on several workflows, and these have been modified to continue testing throughout Worlds. A few of the critical enhancements have to do with remote production. This is vital for efficiency, in addition to keeping consistency with crew by lowering the amount of time some teams need to be on the road.

A New Home in Seoul: Play-in Stage Marks Debut of LoL Park Arena

The LoL World Championship comprised five stages: the Play-In Stage (Oct.1-7 in Seoul), the Group Stage (Oct. 10-17 in Busan), and the Knockout Stages comprising the Quarterfinals (Oct. 20-21 in Busan), Semifinals (Oct 27-28 in Gwangju), and Finals (Nov. 3 in Incheon).

The new 56,900-sq.-ft. LoL Park arena hosted Play-In stages for the LoL World Championship and will serve as home to LoL Champions Korea (LCK) beginning next year.

The Play-In Stage took place at Seoul's recently built 56,900-sq.-ft. LoL Park arena, which has a capacity of 500 people and will serve as home to League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK) beginning next year. The state-of-the-art esports facility was the result of a close collaboration between the Riot Games central team in Los Angeles and the local team in Korea.

The launch of the studio and LoL park was a big moment for both the local Korea team and Riot as a whole, says Rosenthal. The build and commissioning of the studio and control room were a great example of collaboration between the central team and the local Korean team. The central [team] was able to share context and specific workflows that we developed over the multiple studios we helped build around the world.

Instead of trucks onsite, Riot Games leveraged LoL Park's brand-new control room to produce the local Korea feed and content for the in-venue LED screens. For the world feed, Riot sent audio and camera feeds back to its L.A. facility, where the show was directed/cut by the production team and observers (in-game camera operators) and then distributed to streaming/broadcast partners across the world.

One of the advantages o

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