RNG

AUTHOR Andrew Hayward  @ahaywa

Bo Shen VP of International Expansion and Innovation

Royal Never Give Up

Not giving up on the West

iven how many popular esports teams already exist in Western countries, what chance does a Chinese team have of breaking through and going truly international in appeal? That’s the challenge ahead of Royal Never Give Up (RNG), best known for its successful League of Legends and Dota 2 squads. It’s also a meaningful personal challenge for Bo Shen, the team’s Vice President of International Expansion and Innovation. G

“The ultimate goal is also my personal goal,”Shen told The Esports Journal. “We want to, through esports, really connect the cultures between the East and West.”

Shen joined RNG in Shanghai in 2018, but previously worked in Los Angeles for Riot Games from 2013 to 15 as a Mandarin Translator/Culture Ambassador. At the time, he worked with the all-Chinese League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) team LMQ to help promote them in the West. He looks back on that experience with mixed feelings.

“That was an experiment that was kind of a failure, because it was a full-Chinese roster at the beginning of the league and the cultural barrier was very tough to break through,” said Shen. “Also, I thought there were a lot of different opinions and even prejudice among different groups.”

Ultimately, however, Shen said that they were able to build some traction for LMQ in the LCS, and endear popular players to that audience. Now he’s trying to execute that same sort of philosophy on a much larger scale, with several teams across multiple games.

“Through esports, we can really reach out to different communities, because we play the same game, we have the same values, and we value the same story,” he explained. “That’s a very good way to actually connect people across particular cultures, and invent this universal value to make people of different cultures actually appreciate and respect each other.

“That is also RNG’s goal. We don’t want just to be a very good esports team,” he continued. “We also want to be a cultural powerhouse, and actually connect and make our fans in different countries proud of RNG and proud of what we believe in - and have this universal value that can actually affect and make people’s lives better. That’s our goal.”

RNG’s increasing Western focus has been explored via a number of strategies. The organisation employs an American-raised social media staff made up of people originally born in Asian countries, with a level of multicultural understanding that helps them bridge the gap. Shen said that RNG has also interacted closely with its online community and pushed its marketing budget towards giveaways to reward fans.

The team also frequently interacts with other esports teams, including through social media. RNG has worked with Western teams such as G2 Esports and Team Liquid to help them better appeal to the Chinese audience (and vice versa), and also hosted Team Vitality for a boot camp in China. The meeting was heavily promoted and included a League of Legends show match.

“We prepared a lot of social media posts to make people think that something big was about to happen between Vitality and RNG,” recalled Shen. “When they actually came to China, we had a production team follow them and constantly push out content on social media.”

RNG has major Western ambitions on the horizon, although like the rest of the esports industry, the organisation has been dealing with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shen said that RNG had to lay off some operations employees due to the lack of events ahead, and has implemented additional precautions with its current staff and players - including working in separate shifts and splitting training across disparate time slots.

The pandemic has also impacted some of RNG’s sponsorship deals, which Shen said “were hit pretty bad” by the effects of the pandemic. The organisation has been working with sponsors to figure out other ways to promote their brands in this unexpected situation. “Because we couldn’t do any live events, it’s difficult for them to hit their KPI. We’ve tried to work with them more on the social media side, because we couldn’t do a lot of live events,” he said. “A lot of our business was cut, so we can use that kind of resource and manpower to help our sponsors and our partners.”

Shen teased something big on the horizon for RNG’s Western plans, however: a collaboration with a yetunannounced Tier 1 organisation, which he called “one of the most competitive and influential clubs.” That’s due to be revealed soon, and it’s possible that RNG could also establish a physical presence in the West at some point down the line.

“Through that collaboration, I think we can be even more active,” said Shen. “Also, probably in the future, we will have RNG teams in a Western country as well. It’s kind of a longshot, though - we are still considering it.”