League of Legends Worlds Championship 2022.
League of Legends Worlds Championship 2022.
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Riot Games hits peak esports storytelling with League of Legends Worlds Championship | The DeanBeat

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 7 min

Last Saturday I went to my first massive esports event: The League of Legends Worlds Championship. More than 16,000 people crowded into the Chase Center arena where the Golden State Warriors play. It was a polished event, full of esports fan installations from cosplay to pregame podcasts.

Well ahead of the opening, crowds of gamers packed the plaza. I couldn’t have been more detached as a fan. I’m not a League of Legends player, and my colleague Jordan Fragen had to fill me in on the play-by-play of the action for the entire match. But by the end of it, I was as teary-eyed as the other 5.15 million fans (peak viewership per Esports Charts), and it finally dawned on me how powerful esports events can be. I could understand better why people love their games and their esports so much.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.