Riot Games is bringing Kick into the fold for its Mid-Season Invitational 2026, adding the upstart streaming platform to the roster of places where fans can watch the annual League of Legends tournament. The move targets audiences in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Europe, regions where Kick has been working to build a foothold.

What the Kick partnership actually means

The MSI is Riot’s marquee mid-year international event for League of Legends, traditionally held around May and June. It draws professional teams from every major region, and the broadcast operation behind it is massive, spanning multiple languages, time zones, and platforms.

No financial terms or exclusivity details have been made public. Whether Kick paid for the privilege, or whether this is a mutual distribution agreement, remains unclear.

Kick’s play for legitimacy

Kick launched in early 2023 with a simple pitch: be the anti-Twitch. The platform offers streamers up to 95% revenue share, a number that makes Twitch’s standard split look almost punitive by comparison. It also adopted more lenient moderation guidelines, which attracted creators who felt constrained by Twitch’s increasingly strict content policies.

The streaming wars have largely been framed as a two-horse race between Twitch and YouTube. Kick has been trying to position itself as a viable third option, but breaking into that duopoly requires more than generous revenue splits. It requires content that people actively seek out. Esports, particularly League of Legends esports, is exactly that kind of content.

What this means for investors

For anyone evaluating investments in the streaming or esports space, the pattern to watch is whether more major rights holders follow Riot’s lead. A 95% revenue share model is only sustainable if the platform can scale its audience enough to make the remaining 5% (plus advertising and other revenue) cover operational costs.

The risk for Kick is that it remains a supplementary platform rather than a primary destination. Being one of five places to watch MSI is nice, but it doesn’t necessarily drive the kind of habitual viewership that sustains long-term growth.