Weibo will livestream League of Legends 2017 Global Finals

On September 13, Weibo announced that it became the official strategic cooperation partner of the League of Legends in China. Weibo will broadcast live coverage of the 2017 League of Legends world finals, which will be held from September 23 to November 4.

At present, eight platforms will live broadcast 2017 League of Legends global finals, namely, Douyu, Zhanqi, Huya, Panda, Quanmin, Tencent, Weibo and ESPTV.

According to the Weibo 2017 Q2 financial report, the number of active users had reached 361 million by June 2017, while the monthly mobile active users accounted for 92%. League of Legends has more than 100 million monthly active users worldwide and over half of them are active Weibo users.

Apart from the 12 teams in the LPL division, 14 international teams, including South Korea’s SKT and European FNATIC, have opened official Weibo accounts. In China, 65 % of active players have official Weibo account.

The League of Legends has plenty of star players, such as Kris Wu and Jay Chou, who participated in the sixth anniversary of the League of Legends. These stars cover their fans and expands the coverage of the game.

Thus, Weibo has become an important means of communication between professional clubs and players, as well as an important bridge between the official and players, which helps League of Legends to cover more players. Besides, the quality content of the game can also provide a rich diversity of information, such as text images, video, live broadcast, etc., and can help Weibo get more new users.

In terms of the cooperation, director of user communication and relations of League of Legends told jiemian.com reporters that “official Weibo account of the League of Legends has gathered a lot of game users. The powerful publicizing ability of Sina Weibo and interaction with users have important value for League of Legends to lift our social influence, to collect user feedback and to improve products.”

In addition, Weibo has become currently the only platform enabling users to get the game rewards except Tencent, and is also the only one that can share a short video from the game except Tencent. In general, the strategic cooperation is mainly to reassure the core interests of Weibo in live broadcasting the 2017 League of Legends global finals and short videos.

However, whether Weibo will become the only designated platform of the League of Legends except for Tencent remains unknown and whether other social platforms can generate enough flow and achieve win-win situation is also part of the key considerations of the League of Legends.

It is worth mentioning that the Weibo also has deep cooperation with KPL, the Champions League, etc. For example, the competition of King of Glory is linked to Weibo’s Yunjian platform, which publishes short video in real time during the event, and broadcasts the event for fans without time lag.

This article originally appeared in Jiemian and was translated by Pandaily.

Click here to read the original Chinese article.