Riot Games has announced that Kick is joining its official broadcast platforms, alongside Twitch and YouTube, to cover League of Legends, VALORANT and TFT competitions globally (excluding China and Korea, which have their own deals).
The platform, popular in Latin America, the Middle East and Europe, should — according to Riot — make it possible to reach fan communities already heavily present on the service.
The partnership starts with MSI 2026, with live broadcasts of the three titles' global and regional events.
Riot states that the experience offered on Kick will be aligned with that of the other platforms:
- identical drops
- incentives during global event broadcasts
- moderation applied to creators.
Kick streamers will be able to join Riot's partner and creator programs, opening up new ways to grow their community in connection with the publisher's esports ecosystem.
What this choice says about Riot's commercial trajectory
This partnership can't be read independently of the shift Riot has taken over the past year. In June 2025, John Needham, President of Publishing & Esports, announced the opening of the betting sponsorship category to Tier 1 teams in LoL Esports and the VCT across the Americas and EMEA — justified by a betting volume estimated at $10.7 billion in 2024 and by the goal of channeling activity deemed inevitable anyway toward regulated operators.
At the time, Riot had set guardrails: partner vetting, official data mandatorily supplied by GRID, internal integrity programs within teams, and above all an explicit promise that Riot-owned broadcasts and social media would remain "betting-free."
Since then, the signings have piled up:
- 1xBet was approved as a VCT Americas partner in South America
- Winamax struck a deal with G2 Esports and Team Heretics for the LEC, confined to the team's co-streams and content rather than the jersey or the official broadcast.
- Polymarket became GRID's preferred partner and is teasing a major collaboration with LoL Esports.
The logic of gradual but real opening is therefore confirmed announcement after announcement.
It's against this backdrop that Kick's arrival as an official broadcaster has to be placed. The platform isn't a trivial player in the gambling ecosystem — it was launched in 2022 by crypto casino Stake, and its image remains marked by controversies over betting and casino content, by the contested departure of streamers from Twitch to Kick precisely to keep producing that type of content, and by repeated criticism over the lack of transparency around its ownership.
Handing the global broadcast of MSI, Worlds or the VCT to a platform whose commercial identity remains largely shaped by online betting creates a tension with Riot's messaging on "betting-free official broadcasts" — the line between event content and the gambling ecosystem becomes harder to draw once the broadcast vessel itself belongs to that sphere.
Nothing at this stage indicates that Riot plans to loosen its own broadcast restrictions on Kick compared with Twitch or YouTube. But the succession of announcements — the opening of betting sponsorship, the GRID mandate for operators, the Winamax and 1xBet signings, then this broadcast partnership with a Stake-backed platform — sketches a coherent trajectory toward a gradual normalization of ties between the League of Legends ecosystem and the betting industry, rather than toward a durable separation between the two worlds.
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