Did It Work? LEC Rebranding
On January 18th, the first LEC broadcast was introduced to an audience of nearly 400k viewers (Esports Charts). Where are we now though. 4 weeks of LEC later, how has the rebranding held up, and to the biggest question, did it work?
As with most things with business, we go to Forbes to find out what the goals of a proper rebranding should be. In an article written by Joe Simpson, the goal of a rebranding is to craft a new message that speaks to an audience about the brands long term values and direction. So, as we go through the details of this rebranding, we need to establish what riot wanted to achieve through their rebranding. Joe Prachia gave the best answer which was that the EULCS had been created as a pair to its NA counterpart the NALCS. However ““As both leagues grew and established their own audiences and histories, we knew we needed a unique European identity that fans could rally behind.”
So, we have a set goal for this re branding, separate EU from the rest of the League of Legends Leagues (almost as bad of a sentence as Legendary League of Legends League), and to do this task, Riot brought it DesignStudio who had previously done work on the Premier League. Enough of history though, at this point if you are reading this, you have probably seen the rebrand, and i don’t need to go into the process behind it. Let’s instead talk about results.
The Good Stuff
I am a positive person, we are gonna start on the good stuff. Day one viewership for EU peaked at 396k viewers (Esports Charts), so it is suffice to say that the launch on a viewership scale was a success. These number have held even going into week seeing an over 30% increase over this week last year. So, despite the average viewers dropping back towards 100k, it is still an improvement over last year. These numbers are good for EU, and shows that people enjoy the new style EU has brought.
It is also evident throughout the entire broadcast that DesignStudio got to know the casters, the broadcast crew, and really managed to craft a new image that was still distinctly EU. The broadcast is still memey and fun, the humor and personality is still there. The old EULCS broadcast was entertaining to watch despite it falling behind the rest of the League of Legends scene. What was missing in production value was made up for by amazing on air talent. Now the new look, combined with franchising really let the broadcast team shine brighter than they ever have before. I mean, look at Flexius and tell me that that is not the pinnacle of on air talent.
When it comes to the image of EU however, we see the core of the league has been maintained. For as long as EU has reigned, there has been G2, there has been FNC, and there has been everyone else. This has guided the story-lines of Europe since for as long as the league has been around to the point where the only 2 teams in the league who have won the crown have been Fanatic and G2. They played into this with their hype trailer for the Spring Split “It’s Time”, where they rightfully put their rivalry on display, and had everyone else else competing to challenge the two kings. Overall, this did an amazing job of keeping true the the spirit of European League of Legends, and not losing and of the charm that brought people to it in the first place.
One of my favorite things to come from the LEC is the new logo. The logo I just think is great. It is super simple, super distinctive, and the crown I think is one of the best ways to represent Europe. The main story-line in Europe has always been that of the “Kings of Europe”, so this fits perfectly into what they are trying to do. The animation of it also just looks really sleek with the crown rising up out of the ground.
Overall, the re-branding looks very good, it feels very good, and there is a lot to love about it. That does not mean however, that the launch went off without flaws
The Bad
So, before I start in here, I want to make it clear that the rebranding was great. Overall, I love it. There is a reason this is the first piece I am writing for this blog. It however, really hamstrung itself in a few ways that were, to put lightly, not good.
I won’t harp on this stuff much because at the end of the day, production can only do so much to stop it, but the pauses and remakes on day 1 were quite simply, terrible. Luckily the viewers were patient and the on air talent good enough to keep the broadcast doing despite the flaws. This however does not change the fact that most of the discussion on the day was centered around the FNC vs SK remake, rather than the day as a whole. If EU wanted to kill the EU pause meme, day 1 did nothing but cement that it would continue to be a meme with the transition to the LEC. This sadly really undercuts just how good the production team is since day 1, when you have the most viewers that will come until the playoffs, it is riddled with these errors and bugs
The other note from the production side of it comes from forcing the storylines of Europe. As mentioned earlier, Europe is a region that is built on its stories, but there needs to be a gap between storytelling and in game casting. There were multiple points, particularly in week 2 and 3 with Misfits where the cast failed to feel natural because of this focus on storylines. They are great additions to the cast, but at the end of the day, Europe’s on air personalities are some of the best in the business, and their personalities should shine through the cast, even if that means leaving some of the story building to the analyst desk and promo material. Luckily this seems largely resolved, with Foxdrop making a very self aware joke to start out week 4.
But, now is the the actual problem I have with the rebranding, the real issue with the rebrand itself. Someone thought vertical text was a good idea. Like, someone was in love with vertical text. Like…..ahhhh, it was everywhere to start. Who thought this was a good idea. A UI needs to fulfill 2 functions.
- Be Legible
- Look Good
Vertical text fulfils number 2, great. It looks good. But OMG, I don’t want to tilt my head during a broadcast. No one wants to do that, no one. At the end of the day, you want to attract new viewers, you want to attract new viewers and some of them will already see the barrier to entry of understanding League of Legends, the UI should be there to help as much as possible in that, and making it harder to read is not the way to do that. It is such a small thing, but at the end of the day, it almost is never the correct choice when it comes to readability.
Champion select also raises a few eyebrows for me overall. It is nice, design wise it looks good, but it also weird to have one region mismatch every other region on this portion of the game. I have more than enough faith in the design team to find a way to make the traditional champion select work, so why are we totally redoing it. It just feels weird that international play will use one look, every other region uses one look, and LEC has changed. Like, I appreciate the innovation, but I feel like re-inventing the wheel doesn’t serve a real purpose in this scenario.
Overall
This rebranding has escalated the quality of League of Legends coming from Europe by an immense amount. The production quality has been raised to the point where overnight EU went from the one of the least polished regions, to possibly the most. The production team has done an excellent job of making the most of this opportunity to revamp EU, and I am super excited to see what else they have in store. While there is a lot of nitpicks in the bad stuff, they are just that, nitpicks. Overall I am immensely impressed by this and have been thoroughly enjoying my weeks of watching Europe for the purpose of this project.
