Riot Games opens remote broadcast and content production centre in Ireland

A packed arena in Paris for Riot Games’ 2019 League of Legends World Finals

A growing esports portfolio has prompted the expansion of Riot Games’ global production footprint with a new remote broadcast and content production centre (RBC) in Dublin, Ireland. The centre is part of Riot’s drive to innovate and advance its digital broadcast and production capabilities for esports as well as to serve players and fans.

Riot Games and its Esports Technology Group (ETG) is growing to enable efficient, game-agnostic production of esports content, through technical innovation, standardised workflows, and shared infrastructure. The RBC in Dublin will be the first of up to three facilities in a global follow-the-sun model, with each RBC having the ability to produce six events
simultaneously across production and audio rooms, bullpens and live stages, all built upon a scalable technology backbone for future growth.

Commenting on the announcement, Allyson Gormley, general manager at Riot Games’ first RBC in Dublin, said: “As global esports explodes in popularity, Riot Games finds itself in need of new production and operations workflows that better serve our multi-product future with LoL Esports, Valorant Champions Tour, Wild Rift Esports, and more. As part of our drive to continuously innovate and advance our digital broadcast and production capabilities, Riot Games is excited to expand our global footprint to include this new RBC in Dublin.”

Riot Games has partnered with NEP Ireland to provide technical production staffing and support at the facility. “We are delighted to be working on this project with Riot, further recognising Ireland’s global reputation as a hub for delivering world class production content. This partnership will see us grow and develop our talent base in Ireland and shall provide a great opportunity to attract diverse talent from under-represented backgrounds,” said Steve Curran, NEP Ireland.

The new Riot Games RBC will be located in Airside Retail Park, Swords, Dublin and will create over 120 jobs across broadcast engineering, production, control crew, and event production. Roles will be advertised on www.riotgames.com and www.nepgroup.ie/talent in the coming weeks

Welcoming the news Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Leo Varadkar TD, said: “This is great news for the esports sector in Ireland. Riot Games is world renowned and the fact that the team has chosen Dublin as one of three locations globally to establish a new remote production broadcast centre, creating over 120 jobs, is a real vote of
confidence in what we have to offer. We introduced a new tax credit as part of the budget, which will, we hope, encourage the digital games industry to grow here. The very best of luck to the Riot Games team, I wish them every success.”

Riot Games first set up its EMEA headquarters in Ireland in 2010 and has grown over the past decade to 165 employees in its Dublin city centre office. Up until now, its primary focus was on business operations, engineering, information security, publishing, live services and product development for its games.

Alan Bridgeman, managing director, Riot Games, commented on Riot’s further investment in Dublin and expanding to a second Dublin location: “We chose Dublin for this strategically important investment because we are confident in the tech talent available, the attractive business environment, and our positive experience of serving our players from across Europe since we first set up here.”

She added: “We’ve been very lucky to be surrounded by teams, both internally and externally, who have partnered with us to make sure our ambitious goal to stand up this facility by January 2022 could be achieved. From the teams at Henry J.Lyons
Architects, Structure Tone GC, Fingal County Council, KMCS, AXIS and DMG Engineering plus NEP to name but a few, to get to where we are today would simply not have been possible without their partnership. In a nutshell, the innovation and approach to this project speaks to the culture at Riot; we push ourselves further than we are comfortable because we believe
when outside our comfort zone that’s when the magic happens. We have one singular mission; we are trying to bring joy to billions of fans around the world. We think this gets us closer to that goal.”