Next Steps for Wild Rift Esports

We’ve learned a lot in our inaugural year of Wild Rift Esports, and we’re so grateful for the support from the community, players, and teams from around the globe.
Esports
John Needham

A year ago, we launched the inaugural season of Wild Rift Esports, Riot’s first mobile esport. We went in with all the aspiration, ambition, and resources we provide our major esports. While we built an exciting sport across several regions this past year, we have decided to put our focus on where mobile esports and gaming are flourishing, and wind down our own competitive operations in the rest of the world.

In 2023, we will centralize the operation and focus of Wild Rift Esports in Asia, the biggest and most active mobile esports market in the world. The new Wild Rift league in Asia will be the first Riot cross-regional professional mobile esports league and will replace the original Wild Rift Esports (WRE) in April of 2023. This new league ecosystem will consist of twelve teams from China’s WRL and eight teams from the other 2022 Asian regions. The season will be structured as two splits each year and will focus on showcasing the best talent from the most competitive regions in our sport.

Given the vigorous mobile esports market in Asia and the level of competition in these regions, as showcased at Icons 2022, we’re thrilled to bring interregional level play to the Wild Rift Esports regular season for the first time. The new Wild Rift Asian league will bring the intensity and hype of regional rivalries more regularly to our fans in Asia. We’ll have more details to share about this new league in early 2023!

As part of the new plan, outside of Asia, we will no longer directly operate Wild Rift esports leagues and instead unlock the opportunity for third parties to host events - so that we will have our priority and focus on the up-coming Wild Rift Asia League.

We believe these changes will give the community time and runway to grow organically and establish what role high-level competition will play in their ecosystem. As the Wild Rift esports landscape evolves, we’ll be ready to move in lockstep.

We’ve learned a lot in our inaugural year of Wild Rift Esports, and we’re so grateful for the support from the community, players, and teams from around the globe. Thank you, and we look forward to introducing the new Asian league in 2023!