Feeling the NRG: Riot Games puts on a show for Valorant Champions Paris final By Jo Ruddock
Monday, October 13, 2025 - 09:17
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After more than three weeks of intense gaming in the French capital, Valorant Champions Paris reached a dramatic conclusion at the Accor Arena on Sunday 5 October, with North America's NRG beating Europe's Fnatic 3-2.
A packed arena and audiences around the world enjoyed not just high-energy gaming but an opening ceremony featuring performances from 347aidan, templuv, Qing Madi, and 8AE.
For organiser Riot Games, the focus throughout the tournament was creating and distributing a fan-centric event that leads the way when it comes to engagement and technical innovation. To achieve this, a whole host of technology was deployed on site, while production and distribution was handled out of the company's Dublin Remote Broadcast Center Powered by AWS (RBC).
Some 73 cameras were deployed to capture the in-arena action, including 33 for the world feed and opening ceremony. For the opening ceremony this included a Motion Impossible Agito Sport camera on stage that captured close-up shots of the artists while remaining out of view of the audience. Other speciality cameras included an ARRI Trinity, Steadicam and Moviebird 50XL, as well as a winchcam which hung in the centre of the stage, capturing unique overhead shots of both teams for use in between rounds.
Many of the cameras used by Riot are Sony. This included the use of two Venice cameras with a very specific shutter angle during the opening ceremony to capture laser effects synchronised to music creating an almost AR effect. Other Sony units included P50s, 3500s and FX3s. Ten Bradley Micro PTZs were focused on the gamers themselves.
All of this meant there was no shortage of content available for the replay operators based in Dublin who were charged with finding unique and informative angles to enhance the storytelling.
We have four XT-Vias just doing replays on this show, explains Alex Rybalko, senior manager, broadcast engineering, Riot Games. They'll be taking in 40 different angles and they'll cut packages. We also use the EVS Xtra Motion super-slow mo.
It's a really replay-intense show, the game rounds go for two to three minutes, then there's a 30 second reset. So every two minutes, the EVS team is putting a two- or three-play package together to use during the reset, adds James Wyld, principal infrastructure engineer, Riot Games. The replay operators are really skilled players because they are taking a different view of the game. They're looking for what was interesting across all 10 player viewpoints.
The replay team works alongside a team of on-site observers, experienced esports players who closely watch all the action and decide what's worth showing in real time.
Wyld adds: It's a pretty intense process. The observers run two computers, one screen has more information and one is much cleaner. The clean one is our actual camera in the game, and it's configured to follow the observer's view, so they [the observer] can have all of the tools, all the extra text information in front of them on screen, but that doesn't get relayed to broadcast. Then we've got the clean observer PC beside them, and that's the one we capture the camera out from, which then gets fed into the flypack.
In addition to the on-site team, 48 people worked on the tournament in the Dublin RBC and whether events are handled out of Dublin or the RBC in Seattle, the intention is to keep the processes and the technology as simple and standardised as possible.
Rybalko explains: The philosophy is to keep them exactly the same, because we want people to be familiar with the product whether they're doing a show in Seattle or Dublin. We built Dublin first, so there was a lot of learnings, but that was by design. We wanted to go into this bleeding edge tech with a smaller basket, and then once we worked out some of the bugs and had our learnings, we applied that for the build in Seattle and then retrofitted that back to Dublin, because we definitely want to keep it in sync. These shows move around the world. Last year, this exact show was (produced from) Seattle . This year it's here and in Dublin, so we want to make sure that the talent that we build up with our staff and our partners, we can continue to utilise it instead of having to rebuild it every time.
This year, the technical setup has been enhanced by the addition of a new ST 2110 flypack. These kits that are traveling for the shows could be hanging off either facility. So anytime you've got the kit and the facility interacting you want that to always be the same. Tally is a great example. It's the thing no one thinks about until you really need it so making sure that when the switcher in Dublin or Seattle is cutting, we're lighting up cameras correctly in the facility or on site, adds Wyld.
Finals also have the added complexity of an opening ceremony, which means also thinking about compatibility with third-party vendors.
Rybalko says: It gets very complicated because even though the opening ceremony and the main show are distinct, we share a lot of the resources. So we have to figure out, how do we integrate with a third-party vendor who's providing us with the opening ceremony facilities, but then that's going to go into the main show as well. We need to make sure that not only are we pushing the envelope in terms of what we do, but we're keeping in mind that we have to be compatible with a lot of the long-standing vendors that we work with too.
Audio also plays a key role in the esports experience, whether that's the fully integrated comms infrastructure or the powerful bass-heavy in-stadium sound. Players are also miced up and there's a
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Feeling the NRG: Riot Games puts on a show for Valorant Champions Paris final By Jo Ruddock 
