Daniel Ringland, Head of VALORANT EMEA answers all pressing VCT questions

Esports.net was offered the opportunity to interview Daniel Ringland, Riot Games Head of VALORANT Esports, EMEA, ahead of the VCT EMEA Stage 2 Grand Finals, which ultimately ended in a 3-1 victory for Fnatic.

A range of topics were discussed, including the impact of the January layoffs, potential for Saudi sponsors/events, feedback from players on gruelling schedule, and who he thinks will win Champions Seoul.

Daniel Ringland

Image credit: Riot Games

Lee Jones: Are there any plans for larger stadium/arena events for future finals.

Perhaps watch parties like the ones going on for Americas?

Daniel Ringland: For watch parties, quite a few happen already… they’re pretty amazing. One of my goals for the year was to get down and bang the drum at the FUT. I must say, I didn’t actually get there – have to make that a 2025 goal. But we want to see more of those, for sure. And it’s great that the teams run them. Ultimately, I think for fans to attend an event that’s run by the team they love is actually a bit cooler than to attend one that we run. So for sure, we’ll keep encouraging teams to operate those. We’ve got a lot of teams with pretty big fan bases that run all sorts of events, so hopefully more and more.

Lee Jones: During the current playoffs run a few players have complained of exhaustion due to the packed schedule.

Is that something you’ve seen, and will you look into reevaluating the schedule for next year as a result?

Daniel Ringland: Definitely. I think there’s a lot that we like about the format. It’s produced some really exciting games. I feel really good that we’re sending four great teams to Champions. So there’s a lot that’s working, but there’s some things that aren’t quite right and I think the pacing of the season is definitely something that we’ll be looking to make some changes and improve next year.

Ultimately, when we sit down and think about the format, we’re thinking: “Hey, what’s going to be super exciting for fans?”

But for fans to get the best bang for their buck, they need the pro players to be at their peak. And yeah, we’re hearing that from the pro players as well, that that could be better.

VCT EMEA Arena Finals

Photo by Michal Konkol/Riot Games

Lee Jones: I wanted to touch on  Riot’s January layoffs.

What sort of impact was felt on VCT EMEA as a result of those, particularly on the broadcast?

Daniel Ringland: I’ve been at Riot a long time, and plenty of people that were let go had been around for a while. So it was sad and it was hard. We were shortly after tasked with; ‘we wanted to make sure the show went on’.

For sure, we had to change the way we worked a little bit. Like, we lost some really incredible people. You can’t replace that.

So it meant that we had to kind of change the way we worked, but also kind of focus in and try to be a bit more intentional about what we do and what we don’t do. And I think that took us some time. But when I look at the show and when you see some of the stuff we got cooked up later this afternoon, I think we’re back to producing something that is worthy of what the fans want. And at the end of the day, that’s the most important thing.

Lee Jones: There was a report from Richard Lewis at the time that detailed the feeling that the necessity of roles of those let go wasn’t considered during the decision, with many having been working across international events and/or contributing both to the the LEC and VCT EMEA.

How did that process look like from your point-of-view?

To be totally honest, I wasn’t privy to any of how this was done, so I don’t really have much to say on that. What I was tasked with was figuring out, like; ‘okay, how does the show go on and how do we keep the best product for fans?’

Lee Jones: I wanted to touch on the ever-growing Saudi involvement in esports. We’re a number of years on from the LEC NEOM debacle, and at this moment in time the growing presence of Saudi entities has meant that there isn’t always the same level of outrage for new sponsorships/events like there was then.

Would VCT EMEA be open to that type of Saudi government-backed sponsor now?

I think Riot’s learned a lot from that. And when I think of VALORANT and EMEA specifically, we don’t have anything like this that’s in the works at the moment. But what I can say is that Riot has a fairly robust process with senior people that consider these opportunities and make sure that we’re making the best decisions in the interests of fans and the business.

Could there ever be an event held there? For example, if the Esports World Cup offered to host the EMEA Stage 2 finals next year?

There’s no plans for that at the moment. We’re obviously planning a few years out, and, yeah, I can say there’s nothing like that that we’re working on right now. We do care about the fans in MENA, and we want to be able to serve them – it’s why we have the Challengers league there and those sorts of things. But, yeah, no events like that planned at the moment.

Lee Jones: The recent announcement of the Ascension schedule has caused some frustration with the reduction in LAN games.

Could you explain the reasoning behind that decision?

Daniel Ringland: What we saw with the viewership last year is that the vast majority of fans were really focused in on the final couple of days really, so that’s where we want to invest. So this year we’ve kind of increased the investment we’ll be making into the business end of the tournament because that’s where we see the most demand.

On viewership, are you pleased with the way things are headed right now for VCT EMEA?

Everyone that works at Riot is really ambitious, including myself. So for sure, I want to continue to see this thing grow. So for us growth will continue to be a focus next year. Our AMA (Average Minute Audience) is up this year, which we’re happy about. We haven’t hit the same peak as last year, but we also haven’t had our peak moment – that is two and a half hours away. So, yeah, we’re happy to see the AMA increasing, but for sure we know that we’ve got a pretty great product here. We got amazing pro players. We’ve got amazing teams. We want to see it keep growing.

VCT EMEA Discord Dan Ringland

Daniel with the creators of the VCT Community Discord

Does the viewership of the other regions come into play when figuring out viewership aims? Or is there not that sort of competition?

So we work together very closely. My regional counterparts and I, we meet frequently in person a couple of times per year. So we’re constantly sharing our plans and our approach with each other. We have different teams in the regions because we think that each region does need a different approach. So we know we need to go about things differently.

For sure we often compare notes and try to beat each other. We’re all gamers at the end of the day, the competitive streak is there. But yeah, we take a lot of inspiration off each other and I think the friendly competition between regions — whether it’s the pro players or the staff behind the scenes — is really good for the fans.

Who’s winning Champs?

Oh, man, that’s rough. Well, I’d be happy if it was pretty much any one of four teams, as long as it’s one of ours. I feel like we’re overdue. But I will say on that I think one of the great things about VALORANT is that we’ve seen such diversity in winning regions, as cool as it would be to be winning them all the time as the leader of EMEA. I’m actually happy for the sport that we’ve seen a lot of diversity in the winning competition.


Editor’s Note: “The author’s travel expenses to attend the event were provided by Riot Games.”

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