This announcement comes as Riot’s new first-person shooter game, Valorant, debuted its beta version on Twitch, with audiences topping one million concurrent viewers at peak hours. While Riot declined to address Valorant’s status as a potential esport, some esports franchises have already begun securing pro players for what is seen by them as the inevitable development of a Valorant league. For its part, Riot has said that it has planned for Valorant to become an esport but declined to provide any details. For now, however, the company is focusing on TFT.

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“This Galaxies Championship is our first effort in esports to try to give the highest level competitors an aspirational path — a higher-stakes meaning to their play,” said Whalen Rozelle, the director of global esports at Riot.

Teamfight Tactics, which uses the champions from Riot’s flagship title League of Legends and began as an in-game mode available only to League of Legends players, has enjoyed a swift rise to prominence. The game, in which eight players battle each other in a strategic deathmatch, was modeled on the outsize success of Dota Auto Chess, a game variant of Dota 2 made by the third-party developer Drodo Studio. Riot was quick to develop their own take on the genre, known as auto battlers, because the player is responsible only for the strategic elements of the game, with the combat outside of the player’s direct control.

By announcing the Galaxies Championship, which is set to take place later this year, Riot hopes to show its commitment to Teamfight Tactics, investing in the game’s competitive scene at a favorable time for esports in general and Riot in particular.

“We really felt a lot of pain and we empathized with the players who were telling us, ‘Hey, I’m at the top of this ladder, what’s the next step? How can I really prove myself against the world?’ And so the Galaxies Championship is our answer to that,” Rozelle said. “We think that this is a really good first foray into competitive TFT.”

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While committing a $200,000 prize pool for the Galaxies Championship and hosting its eight regional qualifiers is a significant investment, it’s also a cautious step forward for Riot, which is trying to determine the level of interest in competitive Teamfight Tactics going forward. The game has been out for about a year; so far, its competitive ecosystem has been dominated by smaller invitation-only events. Larger tournaments organized by third parties are scarce, considering the game’s popularity.

“We don’t want to force esports when esports isn’t a thing,” Rozelle said. “And so it took us about six to eight months to determine, ‘Hey, are people interested in this? Are people interested in competing in this? What’s the competitive drive? And having more or less heard from players that yeah, this is something … we’re interested in, at that point, what we do is we come in and we design something bespoke and hopefully something interesting and compelling for players.”

Teamfight Tactics has been successful by almost any measure. There were over 33 million players per month last year, and Riot launched a stand-alone mobile version of the game in March of this year. But the game has struggled recently on platforms like Twitch, where its viewership has steadily plummeted since last summer. One of the game’s most popular pros has expressed fear for its decline.

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At the same time, Rozelle told The Post that Riot’s immense success with League of Legends puts Teamfight Tactics, as a kind of younger cousin to the esports titan, in an enviable position. Armed with abundant money and talent, Riot is in no hurry with the Teamfight Tactics scene, and the announcement of the Galaxies Championship reflects confidence that TFT can sustain enthusiasm in the absence of a stronger financial draw, or a restructuring of play around a franchise system, as the North American League pros (LCS) did in 2018 and the Korean teams (LCK) did just recently.

Riot’s move to fund competitive Teamfight Tactics is part of a broader effort to develop its esports offerings beyond the success of League of Legends. Valorant, their new team-based shooter currently in closed beta, is expected to launch a ranked system similar to that of League of Legends in the coming weeks, well before its broader release at a so far unspecified time this summer.

“We’re overwhelmed by the initial reception to Valorant,” Rozelle said. “We have been planning on it being an esport … we know that there’s going to be demand for it. But at the end of the day, we also want to ensure, just like with TFT, just like with League of Legends, that we serve the Valorant community in the way it uniquely deserves.”

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Ethan Davison is a freelance writer covering games, books, and culture. His work has recently appeared in Medium’s FFWD, The Outline, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Follow him on Twitter @eadavison_.