Cloud and The Rise Of Esports | WIRED Brand Lab

[beams humming]

[crowd cheering]

[Announcer] They've done it!

They've actually done it!

[Ashwin] The League of Legends World Championship finals

is the largest event in eSports.

[Announcer] It's going to be a pentakill!

[Ashwin] It's exciting. There's drama. There's tension.

[Announcer] TRX are your world champions!

[Ashwin] The atmosphere is electric.

The players are the best in the world.

[dramatic music]

[adventurous music]

[Jay] We never started out intending to be in eSport.

We just made a really good competitive online game

and it happened organically.

People love to watch other people play who are really good.

So did I. I was one of them.

And when I see one of my favorite players

use my favorite champion in a match and win the game,

I want to go play.

[Announcer] What a series. [electronic music]

[Announcer 2] This was delivering man,

everything I hoped for.

When League of Legends came out, it was an immediate hit

and Riot Games had to do a lot of creative things

in order to scale up to the demand

and meet the players where they were at the time.

Since then, they've released more titles,

which require a lot more cloud

infrastructure to be deployed.

That's actually where the partnership with AWS really began.

[Announcer] This is insane! There's no way to hold.

The challenge here is Riot Games

has a truly global fan base and player base.

It's gonna takes a cloud provider at the scale of AWS

to really be able to be in all of those geographies.

[Jay] We have big goals here at Riot

to serve players everywhere in the world

and we challenged AWS with things like outposts

and local zones to make it happen.

[Announcer] Your world championship finalists!

[electronic music]

Our infrastructure and the services

that we build on top of it is built

for our customers and what they need.

Local zones, that's essentially taking

the physical infrastructure that would

typically be housed in these very large areas

and moving that physical infrastructure out to the edge.

Driving down to single-digit millisecond latency

just enhances the player experience.

Latency is everything for a multiplayer game.

If the ping is bad, it can be an amazing game,

but it's not gonna be fun.

[electronic music] [crowd cheering]

[Ashwin] This is one piece of the puzzle.

The other side is the broadcast and eSports fan experience.

[Player] Copy. Two minutes.

Two minutes. Joe for lighting.

Joe for lighting.

[music drowns out echoing speech]

One of the unique challenges we have at Riot

is our tournaments happen in different spaces

and in different stadiums all over the world.

How do you do that without just deploying

mass numbers of broadcast, tech and people

and spending a ton of money in those different spaces.

Using these remote broadcast centers, Riot Direct

and our AWS partnership to transition those signals,

we allow our different regions and broadcasts

from around the world to pick up that feed

that's coming through those AWS pipes.

That way they can stay wherever their studio

happens to be at that point in time,

layer their own language over the top of it

and voila, now you have, say, worlds in Tagalog

that you wouldn't have had any other way.

[foreign language]

[crowd cheering]

After people watch something like Worlds,

there's a huge surge in demand to play the game as well.

And in the past this was a pretty scary proposition for us,

but on AWS we use things like the horizontal pod autoscaling

and Kubernetes and it handles it seamlessly

to scale up to meet the demand of the players

that we have immediately after something like Worlds.

[Stefan] We love being able to do this alongside AWS

because we know that they're continually pushing.

We're gonna continue to push on our side

and we're gonna push each other to find the outer edges

of, like, what we can do, and that's the exciting part.

[Ashwin] The partnership has

really evolved naturally, right?

Riot Games, they came out with League of Legends

and now they're operating multiple games.

New games means new requirements for cloud services.

So AWS is going to be there to help.

And we're getting to a space of partnership

that's beyond just plugging cables

into a thing and making stuff happen.

We're actually partnering on the storytelling

that allows our fans to really get more out of the game.

[Robert] Riot aspires deliver

the best player experience in the world

and AWS aspires to deliver the best

customer experience in the world.

And that's what's really kind of driven this partnership

over the years and how it's just blossomed.

[Announcer] Come on! Now to fire a hail of an arrow!

[announcers and crowd cheering]

Kuma Yushi!

[crowd applauding]