New Schedule for the New Year: Riot Games announces future plans for 2023 Broadcasting Schedule

With 2022 coming to a close and 2023 fast approaching, the gaming year goes into transition as well. Valorant esports is on the rise with the expected onset of new fans to the debut of the franchise leagues, as well as the continued support of fans of League of Legends esports. With both games sharing fans and communities, the overlap between both esports titles has only grown larger. Thus, a revamp to the broadcasting schedule was eventually needed to relieve the bloated current schedule.

As Riot wrote: ‘With the growth of our esports, we are revamping our broadcast scheduling practices to better serve the fans.’ They illustrate their goals for the new year of broadcasting into 4 focuses:

• Broadcasts that reduce overlap
• Schedules that match viewer preferences
• New opportunities to explore formats and fresh content
• Updated schedules across the different leagues and games for the 2023 season

Prior to 2021, League of Legends was Riot’s only large esports ecosystem. However, the advent of Valorant, and the subsequent esports community that spawned urged Riot to expand their abilities to facilitate multiple ecosystems and the fans that traversed the two.

Learning and Data Discovered

Fans of a particular title were more likely to follow their favorite game regardless of region. This meant League of Legends NA fans were more likely to watch the LEC than VCT Americas and vice versa. Thus, Riot moving forward plans to ‘prioritise minimizing overlaps of matches from the same game.’

Moreover, fans had two primary attractions during viewings; to watch their favorite teams, and to watch the matchup of the week. So, Riot has affirmed their desire to ‘create a scheduling system that would allow [Riot] to shift games…to optimise viewing times across regions.’

Centralising the viewing experiences to weekends was not sustainable as it created fatigue in viewers from oversaturation of content during certain periods. Also, because of fans’ internalization of gaming, the culture has become the norm to seek viewing esports as part of the weekday routine as well. Riot thereby, has decided to space out the viewing experiences to include the previously untapped market of the other days.

Lastly, by spacing out the games and viewing experiences, it reduces the viewer’s decision dilemma to ‘to watch or not to watch.’

New Schedule for League of Legends and Valorant

LoL Esports

• LCS- Thursday and Friday (12pm PT)
• LEC- Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (6pm CET)
• CBLoL- Saturday and Sunday (1pm BRT)
• LPL- Monday to Friday (5pm CST), Saturday and Sunday (3pm CST)
• LCK – Wednesday to Sunday (with updated start times)

Updated Start times for LCK in 2023. Screenshot from Riot Games

VCT

• Americas- Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (12pm PT)
• EMEA- Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (6pm CET)
• Pacific- Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (6pm KST)