Los Angeles, CA -Sunday, September 25, 2016 -(TerraUS, mhUSA)-
It must be hard responding and interacting with one of the largest fan bases in the world, but somehow Riot manages to keep everyone involved and in-tune with every little change. Riot, fans, and team owners and players have been up in arms as of late over a dispute between Riot co-owner Marc Merrill and SK Gaming.

Many threads popped up where loyal followers discussed their concerns about Riot Games and the future of League of Legends. The outcome was unclear, until the leaked documents subsequently ended in announcement from Riot about their future plans.

In a lengthy blog post title “LoL Esports Now and in the Future” Riot discusses their plans for 2017. While most of this speaks about players, teams, relationships, fans, etc. the most intriguing section speaks about crowdfunding from, arguably, the biggest crowd.

Championship skin & ward – From now, 25% of revenue from each year’s Championship skin and Championship Ward will be added to the Worlds prize pool. That means every purchase of Championship Zed will directly increase the prize pool for Worlds 2016.

For context, had this been applied last year, it would have more than doubled the prize pool. Challenger skin – Similarly, going forward, 25% of revenue from each year’s Challenger skin will be added to the MSI prize pool.

Team Championship skins – Beginning with the winning team from this year’s Worlds, we will be sharing 25% of the revenue earned on skin sales in the launch year of each set of Team Championship skins directly with the players who inspired them, as well as their team and league (because it takes a village to make a champion). In the spirit of celebrating past champions, we’ll also be sharing revenue from past Team Championship skins with the previous winners – players, teams and leagues (Fnatic, TPA, SKT, Samsung White and SKT again)

New (and improved) digital goods – Next year, we’ll be introducing new revenue sharing opportunities, such as team-branded in-game items and esports promotions, as well as improving revenue sharing on summoner icons (World icons increasing from 20-30% and regional league increasing as determined by each league).

We believe the potential for revenue is extremely strong for committed teams building strong brands – but given that these are new and untested products and we’re looking to address an immediate gap in team revenue, in 2017 each league will set aside a guaranteed minimum to each of its teams as it determines appropriate based on regional needs. For example, the EU LCS will have a minimum revenue amount of €100,000 per team for the full season, of which 50% will go to players as supplemental income on top of their existing salaries

Even without counting the retroactive payments to past champions, this will contribute millions of dollars in additional revenue to teams and pros each year. Now, to put things in perspective: In January 2016 the Daily Dot reported that League of Legends made over $1.6 billion in revenue.

The number was comprise by SuperData research “which uses digital point-of-sale data from the publishers, developers, and payment service providers, alongside qualitative consumer insight, to put together its year-end report.”

We can safely assume that a large portion of that came from digital cosmetic sales, since League of Legends is free-to-play. What’s uncertain is how much of that can be broken up into the above points to truly grasp how much each cosmetic made in that year, but we can deduce that it’s an incredibly large number.

Riot are talking about pumping millions into the eSport, and while that sounds like upward 10 million, maybe 20 million, I’m telling you to aim higher and think upwards of 50.