LAS VEGAS—On Wednesday, Riot Games co-founder and CEO Brandon Beck kicked off the 2015 DICE Summit with a keynote speech aimed largely at the annual show's crowd of triple-A game developers and investors. That meant a lot of cheerleading about how video game companies should adjust their hiring and management practices, and he used the successes of his company's massive game League of Legends to tell that story.

To illustrate one point, Beck exposed the late-2013 revolt within the League of Legends game development team after Riot was caught forcing its own contracted e-sports players to not play competing games on streaming video sites.

"We never set out to run e-sports events at this scale," Beck said as he pointed to giant, arena-sized LoL tournament photos. "The response to our earliest efforts was a delight, but we had to rush to accomplish a lot of things, including professional player contracts. Those run at about 100 pages."

Those contracts included the aforementioned clause about streaming, one that he called a "mistake" and an "overreach." He said that lawyers with expertise in athletic sports industries like the NBA didn't understand what was wrong with the contract's verbiage—"Michael Jordan doesn't wear Reeboks at halftime"—but the angry responses didn't just come from professional players, or even average fans.

The screen behind Beck displayed e-mails from Riot's own intranet that loudly criticized the contract issue. Among the internal complaints: "I feel we need to grit our teeth, put things right, and be prepared to eat humble pie for a while," and "How can an authentic group of gamers think that strong-arming our core community advocates and players is acceptable?” To its credit, Riot changed its professional players' contract language within days, which Beck said he did in part because e-sports players make money on streaming sites during tournament downtime. "We were limiting [pro players'] ability to both hold their audience and entertain themselves," he said.

Beck then stressed the importance of hiring "passionate gamers" in instances like this: "[Smarter hiring] might have prevented this out-of-character language from passing the draft phase." He encouraged games studios to hire candidates with broader experience who also happen to be addicted to the hobby, and he asked the largest games companies to start adding attributes like "goodwill," "talent," and "intangible assets" to their year-end financial reports, just as larger industrial firms do.

"Our balance sheets and financial statements would look no less healthy to investors; possibly more healthy," he said. "[Not doing so] contributes to a systemic undervaluing of [game design] talent in board rooms. We put too much emphasis on the wrong things."