Cisco will be the enterprise networking partner and provide Riot Games’ flagship title with several upgrades, including an update to ‘The Realm,’ the private game server used for the League of Legends World Championship, Mid-Season Invitational, and All-Star Event.
The partnership comes at a crucial time when online gaming sports have taken off in a big way with streaming, championship leagues, and the associated brand events becoming a big part of the gaming culture. So much so that now esports avenues are being considered on the scale of earlier gaming arcades but comparable to other physical sports in magnitude.
In order to power the next decade of esports, Riot Esports will use Cisco’s flexibility, accessibility, and security to produce world-class esports events in all corners of the globe. Esports will broadcast streams with reduced delay and improved quality, bringing fans closer to the action. Riot Games will deploy more than 200 new tournament game servers in regional studios all centrally managed through Cisco’s new Intersight SaaS solution.
“As a sport completely reliant on technology, it is essential that League of Legends runs on a trusted and reliable network,” said Scott Adametz, Esports Tech Lead at Riot Games. “With Cisco as a partner, we now are able to build and expand the infrastructure necessary to deliver the best esports experience possible for fans and professional players all over the world.”
Riot Games Partners With Cisco
League of Legends (Screengrab)
“Our partnership with Riot Games brings together the leaders in esports and networking to offer the best possible connected experience for the players and millions of fans around the world,” said Brian Eaton, Director of Global Sports Marketing at Cisco. “Cisco is committed to redesigning the internet for the future, and esports has a big impact on that goal. With more people online than ever before for work and entertainment, it is critical to have a highly secure, flexible infrastructure in place to help ensure the visual quality and speed that will be required in the future.”
Cisco will provide Riot Games with a mix of its leading networking technology spanning Cisco UCS→ Blade and Rack Servers and Nexus Data Center switches. This will improve the studio broadcasting capabilities.
Cisco will also provide a flexible architecture for Riot’s Regional Broadcast Centers (RBCs) that will serve the global esports for years to come.
Cisco And Riot Games Team Up for League of Legends esports
League of Legends requires a very strong and wide bandwidth to operate at optimal strength for the players, who need millisecond reaction times for the game to respond to and hence, they need no lag. The new Cisco servers are expected to offer up to 200% raw performance improvement over the previous technology.
LoL Esports reached a record-breaking 21.8 million average minute audience (AMA) for the 2019 World Championship Final. Cisco joins some of the world’s most recognized brands, including Mastercard, Louis Vuitton, Unilever’s AXE, Red Bull, OPPO, State Farm, and Secretlab, as premier global sponsors for League of Legends Esports.
“As we expand on the success of the first decade of our sport, we look to align with partners whose expertise will be a force multiplier for delivering the sporting experiences worthy of our pro players and fans,” said Naz Aletaha, Head of Global Esports Partnerships, Riot Games. “Cisco’s products are best-in-class, and we look forward to leveraging their technology and know-how as we continue to scale League of Legends Esports.”
