{"id":116031,"date":"2020-07-29T20:34:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-29T20:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/367247"},"modified":"2020-07-29T20:34:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-29T20:34:00","slug":"updated-riots-lec-league-partners-with-openly-anti-lgbt-sponsor-and-riot-devs-are-furious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/07\/29\/updated-riots-lec-league-partners-with-openly-anti-lgbt-sponsor-and-riot-devs-are-furious\/","title":{"rendered":"Updated: Riot&#8217;s LEC league partners with openly anti-LGBT sponsor, and Riot devs are furious"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Updated 7\/29:&nbsp;<\/strong>In a new statement, Riot Games announced it is junking its partnership with NEOM.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs a company and as a league, we know that it\u2019s important to recognize when we make mistakes and quickly work to correct them. After further reflection, while we remain steadfastly committed to all of our players and fans worldwide including those living in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, the LEC has ended its partnership with NEOM, effective immediately.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In an effort to expand our esports ecosystem, we moved too quickly to cement this partnership and caused rifts in the very community we seek to grow. While we missed our own expectations in this instance, we\u2019re committed to reexamining our internal structures to ensure this doesn&#8217;t happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n<footer>The original story can be found below.<\/footer>\n<p>Riot Games\u2019<em> League of Legends<\/em> European Championship (LEC) looks to be one of the few major organizations that kept its Pride-flavored Twitter icons beyond the month of June, but now that visual promise of inclusion and support is incongruently paired with the announcement that NEOM is sponsoring LEC\u2019s Summer 2020 season<\/p>\n<p>The announcement, which praised Saudi Arabia\u2019s NEOM project as a <a href=\"https:\/\/lolesports.com\/article\/lec-welcomes-neom-as-main-partner-for-the-summer-season\/bltb703445ca4957494\">groundbreaking addition to its sponsorship lineup<\/a>, rapidly faced criticism online, including messages of disappointment from prominent players, esports casters, and Riot Games devs alike.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>NEOM itself is the source of the controversy. The city is a creation of the Saudi Arabian government, conceived under a regime with a history of human rights abuses that include persecution of LGBT&nbsp;persons&nbsp;and other transgressions against human rights.<\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/global-development\/2020\/may\/04\/its-being-built-on-our-blood-the-true-cost-of-saudi-arabia-5bn-mega-city-neom\">The Guardian<\/a>, a portion of the actual construction of the $500 billion futuristic city that boasts \u201cbetter humans, better society\u201d in its marketing is also taking place on&nbsp;land belonging to the Huwaitat tribe and forcibly displacing those currently living in that area.<\/p>\n<p>Those involved with Riot, from esports players and casters to the developers behind the games featured in the league, are speaking out against the partnership en masse online.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">RE the NEOM partnership in particular: there are no &#8220;perfect business partners&#8221; &#8212; any individual, business, or government entity carries baggage, but the weight of that baggage matters. This is unacceptable.<\/p>\n<p> \u2014 blaustoise (@blaustoise) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/blaustoise\/status\/1288544609363099648?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">July 29, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Incredibly disappointed in Riot today and am baffled at how we could support this, does not reflect the company that I started at six years ago and goes against so much of the progress that we\u2019ve been trying to make in the last few years. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/R9N7d09NnS\">https:\/\/t.co\/R9N7d09NnS<\/a><\/p>\n<p> \u2014 alex shahmiri (@RiotAstryx) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/RiotAstryx\/status\/1288545223526637569?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">July 29, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To pour salt on the wound, the sponsorship follows promises of inclusion from Riot Games made in recent years following earlier <a href=\"https:\/\/gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/323919\/Current_and_former_Riot_employees_discuss_the_toxic_feedback_culture_of_the_studio.php\">allegations of a toxic and sexist company culture<\/a> throughout Riot as a whole. That includes a recent op-ed from Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent (via <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamesindustry.biz\/articles\/2020-07-27-riot-games-cultural-crisis-article\">GamesIndustry.biz<\/a>) published the day before yesterday&nbsp;titled \u201cLessons learned guiding Riot Games through a cultural crisis\u201d, further casting doubt on leadership\u2019s ability to back up its words with action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Updated 7\/29:&nbsp;In a new statement, Riot Games announced it is junking its partnership with NEOM. \u201cAs a company and as a league, we know that it\u2019s important to recognize when we make mistakes and quickly work to correct them. After further reflection, while we remain steadfastly committed to all of our players and fans worldwide [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}