Riot Games has announced State Farm has signed a three year extension to stay on as a main sponsor and has even stepped up their participation to include global tournaments for the first time. Which is a big big deal for the League of Legends creators. They've been running a very successful league for awhile and building up momentum with sponsors for several years now and this is part of the natural growth and evolution of the League of Legends competitive scene. Many people speculate that fanbases will grow tired of these games at some point and the interest will peter out, but I would like to point out that Starcraft 2 is over ten years old and is still a staple of competitive gaming.

The last thing to mention this week is with the influx of money in esports comes the issue of protecting players and their rights. Audi and Gamestop have both recently announced their intention to get into gaming so there is money pouring in from every angle and the end result of all of that money is teams are signing players to contracts that make them the majority owners in the player's earnings with the intention of being a profitable business. That isn't the way other pro sports operate technically, collecting money from the players or only paying the player select amount of money from their winnings. The other leagues go the other way; they figure out what percentage of revenue should belong to the players and pay based on that number. In essence, the esports teams are working the problem from the opposite end, instead of giving the player everything they promise but base their promises on expected revenue, they are taking large percentages from the players to create a profit. This creates the atmosphere of disappointed players, they hear they won $10k but after the team takes their cut the player only receives $4k hypothetically. This kind of business model isn't going to last long.

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