Riot adds Kick for LoL, Valorant and TFT broadcasts from MSI 2026

Two days before the first match of the Mid-Season Invitational, Riot Games has widened the list of places where its esports can be watched. In a short statement dated June 26, 2026, the publisher of League of Legends and Valorant said it is adding the streaming platform Kick to what it calls its global roster of streaming platforms. Starting with MSI 2026, Kick carries the live broadcasts of global and regional events of LoL Esports, Valorant and TFT, the initials of Teamfight Tactics. China and Korea are excluded.

The statement is three paragraphs long and is written in Riot's own voice, with no named spokesperson. It gives no financial terms and no duration, and it does not use the word exclusive anywhere. Its title puts co-streaming first: Riot and Kick, it reads, team up to grow global esports co-streaming and watch experiences.

Riot Games statement of June 26, 2026, and Riot's MSI 2026 primer of June 15, 2026.

What Riot announced

The first paragraph of the statement sets the scope. Kick is added so that fans around the world have more ways to watch, to co-stream and to engage with Riot's games and esports. Riot gives its reason in terms of geography: it describes Kick as the primary platform of many esports fans, especially in Latin America, in the Middle East and North Africa, and in Europe.

The second paragraph is addressed to streamers. Kick's creators, Riot writes, get new ways to grow their communities and to connect with the publisher through its creator and partner programs, which it says are expanding across League of Legends, Valorant, TFT and Wild Rift, the mobile version of League of Legends.

The third deals with what a viewer finds on arrival. The experience on Kick is meant to feel familiar, with access to the same drops and incentives as during Riot's global event broadcasts on other platforms. Drops are small in-game rewards given to viewers who watch a live match while logged in. Riot adds that streamers on Kick are held to the same moderation practices and standards as creators elsewhere.

The four games named do not all receive the same thing, and the text is careful about it.

MSI 2026, the first event concerned

The Mid-Season Invitational is the international League of Legends tournament of the middle of the season, between the regional leagues of the spring and the World Championship of the autumn. The 2026 edition is played in Daejeon, South Korea, from June 28 to July 12, according to the primer Riot's LoL Esports staff published on June 15.

Eleven teams have qualified. China's LPL sends Bilibili Gaming and Top Esports, Korea's LCK sends Hanwha Life Esports and T1, and the LEC, the league of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, sends G2 Esports and Karmine Corp. North America's LCS is represented by LYON and Team Liquid Alienware, the Asia-Pacific LCP by Team Secret Whales and Revolve Deep Cross Gaming, and Brazil's CBLOL by FURIA. The primer says the title and additional places at the World Championship are at stake.

In a double-elimination bracket a team is out only after its second defeat: a first loss sends it to a lower bracket, where it can still play its way back to the final. The arithmetic of the field follows from the two stages. Seven of the eleven teams start in the Bracket Stage, and the eighth place goes to the winner of the four-team Play-In.

The primer, which carries the date of June 15 and no update note, shows how Kick fits into the event. It lists three Kick channels, those of Riot Games, of CBLOL and of LoL Esports LA, the Latin American broadcast. On Twitch, the list is longer: the same three, plus LoL Esports TW and League of Legends JP. Viewers earn the tournament's drops by watching live on Riot's LoL Esports site or on Kick while logged in with their Riot account, and the primer adds that during the finals, drops can be claimed by watching on Kick. It also presents Twitch subscriptions to the LoL Esports channels, a paid form of support that brings chat emotes, badges and ad-free viewing. Two of the three Kick channels serve Brazil and Latin America, the first region Riot names in its statement.

Co-streaming, the other half of the deal

Co-streaming is the practice of a streamer showing an official broadcast on a personal channel, with personal commentary and community chat. The Kick statement treats it as an aim of the partnership on the same level as watching.

The statement does not publish rules for Kick co-streamers beyond the moderation standards. The MSI primer gives the frame for this tournament. The MSI 2026 co-streaming program remains invite-only, it says, and includes more than 100 co-streamers through a Co-Streamer Hub. The qualified teams are invited to co-stream as well. The primer set June 22 for the list of remote co-streamers and said that those working on site would be named closer to the final week.

The shape of the practice in a regional league shows in a page the LEC published on January 13, 2026, for its own season. The league announced coverage in 17 languages across broadcast partners and co-streamers, with official broadcast partners in nine of them, and listed its co-streamers by name, marking those partnered directly with one of its teams. The channels linked from that page were on Twitch, YouTube and TikTok, with the Korean platforms CHZZK and SOOP for some Korean co-streamers. Kick was not among them. The LEC described co-streams as something close to virtual watch parties.

On the Valorant side, the most recent international event was presented without Kick. Riot's guide to Masters London, published on May 30 for a tournament played from June 6 to 21, listed Riot's Valorant channels on Twitch and YouTube among the official channels for its twelve teams, and mentioned a co-streamer booth in the fan zone for the last three days, June 19 to 21. The same guide says playoff wins earn points toward Champions Shanghai, the following stop of the Valorant circuit.

Why two countries are outside the deal

Riot's statement excludes China and Korea in a few words and gives no reason. For Korea, a published agreement describes who holds the rights. On December 16, 2025, Naver, the South Korean internet group, announced a five-year strategic agreement with Riot Games for 2026 to 2030. According to Naver's release, it covers the broadcasting rights of the LCK, the LPL and the LEC, and those of three international tournaments, the World Championship, MSI and First Stand, with Naver as an official sponsor and the exclusive streaming platform partner of the LCK. CHZZK is Naver's streaming service. The same release announced that LoL PARK, the league's stadium in Seoul, would be renamed CHZZK LoL PARK, that Naver had secured the naming rights and an official LCK sponsorship, and that viewership drops would be introduced on the service. "This partnership marks the beginning of NAVER and the LCK systematically enhancing the fan experience," said Oh Sanghun, Riot Games' general manager of publishing and esports for the Asia-Pacific region, in that release.

The consequence for the coming fortnight is a tournament whose host country is outside the new arrangement. MSI 2026 is played in Daejeon, two of its eleven teams come from the LCK and two from the LPL, and the Kick broadcasts announced on June 26 exclude both countries.

For China, the statement offers nothing more, and no document comparable to Naver's release is cited by Riot.

A second organizer on Kick in three months

Riot is not the first large tournament operator to add the platform this year. On April 14, 2026, ESL announced that its ESL Pro Tour in Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 would be shown on Kick, starting the day before with IEM Rio. ESL wrote that other distribution platforms remained available for its main tournaments, and made Kick the exclusive home of one competition, the ESL Challenger League, a league for rising Counter-Strike teams.

The two announcements differ on two points. Riot's contains no exclusivity of any kind. And the two organizers treat co-streaming in opposite ways. Riot presents co-streaming on Kick as one of the purposes of its partnership. ESL's Co-Streaming Guidelines 2026, published in April, allow co-streams on Twitch only; they name YouTube, TikTok and Facebook as closed without a written exemption and do not mention Kick. They also cap a co-streamer's webcam at 5% of the screen during play, a kind of rule that appears nowhere in Riot's statement.

What the two have in common is silence on money. Neither ESL nor Riot published financial terms or a duration.

What comes next

The first test is immediate. The Play-In Stage of MSI opens on June 28 and lasts until July 1. The Bracket Stage follows from July 3 to 6 and from July 8 to 12, the day of the Grand Finals.

After that, the statement applies to events it does not list. It speaks of global and regional events of three games, and the only regional league visible so far is CBLOL, through its channel in the MSI primer. In Valorant, the circuit leads to Champions Shanghai. Riot has not published a calendar of broadcasts on Kick. The statement also leaves open how creators on Kick enter Riot's partner programs, and whether co-streaming there stays by invitation, as it is at MSI.

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