The essence of a sport is that it should be easy to learn but difficult to master – think football – and replayable in endless variations that depend on skill levels, team composition, the opponent’s skills and the strategies one chooses to apply. That’s also the claim that Riot Games makes for its League of Legends game, which it has built into a worldwide phenomenon with its own World Championship that attracts huge numbers of viewers and, now, brands as well.
“We are one of the truly globally integrated sports in the world,” Naz Aletaha, head of e-sports/global business development...