The world’s biggest game just said “NO” to South Africa

After visiting South Africa, two members of Riot’s Global Strategy team have concluded that South Africa does not meet the criteria for League of Legends server hosting.

This is in effect means South Africa will not grow and develop alongside League of Legends’ 67 Million other players, the world’s largest game.

While the folks from Riot only had nice things to say about the country, it was made clear that South Africa’s online infrastructure and gaming community still needs to grow.

Check out the full post below:

“Throughout our trip, we were excited and humbled by how vibrant the tech and gaming scenes have become since the last time we looked at the region. However, based on what we see in the market combined with our own internal data, we’re still concerned that there wouldn’t be enough concurrent users to support a healthy ecosystem. Nicolo summed it up well in his previous post, but the challenge we face in smaller, isolated regions is simultaneously delivering both low ping AND an awesome overall player experience besides ping.

Although a local server would certainly improve latency, our forecasts suggest that the resulting fragmented player base would face a lot of issues with matchmaking and queue times. While there are levers we could pull such as removing game modes and limiting certain queues to peak hours, we’re afraid that the number of compromises we’d have to make could lead to an overall player experience that is more frustrating and less enjoyable than the one we have today.”