Riot Games has announced that Kick is joining its official broadcast platforms, alongside Twitch and YouTube, to cover League of Legends, VALORANT and TFT competitions globally (excluding China and Korea, which have their own deals).
The platform, popular in Latin America, the Middle East and Europe, should — according to Riot — make it possible to reach fan communities already heavily present on the service.
The partnership starts with MSI 2026, with live broadcasts of the three titles' global and regional events.
Riot states that the experience offered on Kick will be aligned with that of the other platforms:
- identical drops
- incentives during global event broadcasts
- moderation applied to creators.
Kick streamers will be able to join Riot's partner and creator programs, opening up new ways to grow their community in connection with the publisher's esports ecosystem.
What this choice says about Riot's commercial trajectory
This partnership can't be read independently of the shift Riot has taken over the past year. In June 2025, John Needham, President of Publishing & Esports, announced the opening of the betting sponsorship category to Tier 1 teams in LoL Esports and the VCT across the Americas and EMEA — justified by a betting volume estimated at $10.7 billion in 2024 and by the goal of channeling activity deemed inevitable anyway toward regulated operators.
At the time, Riot had set guardrails: partner vetting, official data mandatorily supplied by GRID, internal integrity programs within teams, and above all an explicit promise that Riot-owned broadcasts and social media would remain "betting-free."
