Riot Games and HBO have started up an advertising campaign, pairing up League of Legends with Game of Thrones for some cross-promotion.

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Dustin Beck, Riot's VP of eSports, spoke with [a]listdaily about the overlap of fans between the two fantasy franchises, suggesting that such promotions might become more commonplace with the growing popularity of the MOBA."Generally speaking, a lot of non-endemic players are starting to take notice," Beck says. "Big names are now starting to understand the demographic that they’re able to reach through eSports, which is a relative nuanced and new demographic that they traditionally haven’t been able to reach effectively."Beck claims that a lot of player surveys were conducted to make sure the promotion fell in line with the fan base. You'll never have to worry about the fantasy-themed MOBA suddenly sponsoring seemingly unrelated brands, Beck says: "We want to make sure that any activations that we do are super authentic to our fans and that we’re not working with brands that aren’t going to have any value to our players."The three-week campaign leads up to the April 6 premiere of Game of Thrones' fourth season. HBO will be receiving marketing assets from Riot, such as on-screen logos and website material. They're also working with the GoT team on producing a mash-up trailer of the two franchises, which we'll be sure to tell you about once it goes live.

Katie Williams is a freelance writer and games journalist. She tweets at @desensitisation and hopes that one day, a bird will tweet back.