BAMTech, a industry subsidiary of MLB Advanced Media, has officially signed a $50 million year-based deal to work with Riot Games on the monetisation and commercialisation of League of Legends.
MLB Advanced Media is a professional conglomerate of 30 Major League Baseball club owners, who’re banding together to provide online services for the league, including the official MLB website, and various club sites. BAMTech is the official streaming provider and subsidiary of MLB Advanced Media.
Riot swiftly confirmed that this deal will not be affecting how the viewers consume League of Legends content during 2017 in any way. This confirmation can be found in an interview with Yahoo Esports.
With regard to the same, Co-head of esports and head of merchandising for Riot Games, Jarred Kennedy said:
We first and foremost believe in making sure that the content is in places where the fans want to watch it, so that will continue to be the case, we believe in making content freely available, and it will continue to be freely available into the future. We have no plans to change that.
Co-head of esports Whalen Rozelle further clarified:
That’s not to say that we won’t innovate down the road. Maybe there is something super cool that we create that has to be behind a premium experience so that fans want to buy into it
BAMTech’s head of business and media, Bob Bowman, mentioned that the first commitment of $50 million annually is just the beginning.
I hope we’re going to do a lot more than that. That’s the minimum guarantee, and I hope we’re going to exceed that by a large margin. And I expect that we will,
he said, citing the fact that esports are a digital-first property, compared to traditional sports.
