Some notes on my Valorant and Esports World Cup coverage

Last week, I published a news story about an internal Esports World Cup document, and Riot Games’ reaction to the premature (and in one case, apparently inaccurate) inclusion of its games in that document. Now, behind the reg-wall, I wanted to share some thoughts about the reaction to that piece, by which I’ve been a bit bewildered. As always, these will be relatively unpolished, open-ended musings.

Last Friday’s article, which is a relatively short, offers just a few pieces of new information:

1. There is an internal Esports World Cup document that lists what appears to be the lineup of games and events at the 2025 Esports World Cup. That document includes Valorant, League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, and also the women’s and marginalized gender Valorant circuit, Game Changers. In the document, this lineup is characterized as near-final, only just shy of being formally confirmed. (Note the “what appears to be” and “near-final” and “just shy of being formally confirmed” — these words actually matter!)

2. Riot Games, in a statement, said that discussions with the tournament organizers were ongoing, and that there was no agreement in place with the Esports World Cup about the presence of the publisher’s games at the event. Riot also categorically denied that Game Changers was under consideration to appear at the 2025 Esports World Cup. A Riot spox also clarified that the EWC had not spoken with them about hosting a women’s event, in response to a question about whether the EWC may be using “Game Changers” as a placeholder term for their own women’s event.

To me, this adds up to: Riot’s games are still under discussion to appear at the 2025 EWC. However, while the EWC may want Game Changers, a public denial from Riot puts the kibosh on that for 2025.

Like every writer I know, I obsessively follow (and sometimes participate in!) the discussions surrounding my work. So I was dismayed to find the report’s key findings paraphrased widely across social media as “Valorant will be at the Esports World Cup.” The story does not say this! Without being too mean, I’ll note that esports fans and content aggregators on social media are not generally regarded as impeccably careful readers. But also, I feel some responsibility for the confusion, so I wanted to go through what I wrote, explain some of the editorial choices I made, and maybe note a few places where I could have taken a different approach.

Before I do this, a maybe obvious disclaimer that none of this handwringing about misinterpretation should be read as a repudiation of or withdrawal from the original reporting. The original article is factually correct, and I stand by the reporting. (Duh!)

Let’s start with the headline: Internal Esports World Cup document includes Valorant in 2025 event lineup. As a pedant, I will defend this headline as wholly accurate. A discerning reader — my ideal reader! — would look at that headline and think: Gee, it sure is interesting that this headline is about a document. I’ve noticed that it stops short of saying “Valorant will be in the 2025 Esports World Cup,” which would surely be a more salacious and click-worthy headline. Let me click into the story to find out why.

But imagining an ideal reader is a flimsy way to prepare for the actual reader. Could I have written a better headline? In retrospect, certainly.

So what does “better” mean in this context?

Let me explain, first, how the article came to be. A short while ago, I received a tip that was only tangentially related to the report that published Friday. (More on this in the future, maybe!) In chasing that lead, I came upon an internal Esports World Cup document that was newsworthy in its own right. After reviewing the information in the document, I reached out to the relevant stakeholders, including the Esports World Cup, its PR people, and Riot Games. Riot’s spokesperson then shared the company’s response to my findings, which went into the piece.

Looking at the headline, I feel that I overvalued process relative to result. Because the reporting started to take shape as soon as I got the leaked document, the document itself became a priority, and eventually, the story’s “frame.” Riot’s response — which was also newsworthy — could have just as easily been the primary focus of the piece, in which case the headline could have looked something like: Riot Games says discussions about Valorant at 2025 EWC ‘ongoing.’ This would have probably solved my “being badly paraphrased by aggregators” problem. But the document came first, and getting it was more complicated than getting the statement, so it felt like the ~newsier~ item. Unconsciously, that colored how the story took shape.

I could have also made a similar fix to the text of the story: lead with (or at least bump up) Riot’s statement and later get into the whole document thing. But I’m less certain of that change than I am about a possible headline fix. In the text of the story, the document is an important catalyst: there’s no Riot statement without it. It is harder to justify leading with Riot’s response to a document if I haven’t explained to readers what Riot was responding to and why.

Here, though, we come up against a bigger problem: People did not seem to read or pay particularly close attention to how I described the document! As I mentioned above, I took great pains to explain that the list in the document is “near-final,” that it “includes language that suggests the list has not been formally finalized,” and that the lineup is characterized as “all but confirmed.” These are not filler words! They’re meant to signal something to an attentive reader! I think a reasonable takeaway is: This document tells us something about the EWC organizers’ intentions, even if the document is not final and has been rejected publicly (in part) by Riot Games. But that’s not what happened, and that may be my fault.

The only way I can imagine drawing more attention to that nuance would be by reproducing the document or quoting from it — both things that I opted not to do in order to protect my sources. Though I wasn’t imagining the ways in which people might misinterpret my work as I was writing, my general instinct was that the effort I was taking to phrase things carefully would be evident on the page. Well, I’ve learned my lesson!

A closing thought: I recently read a Substack essay by the journalist Matt Pearce, in which he writes about journalism in a “postliterate democracy.” Listen, I know. I write video game blogs in my spare time. But there were a few things Pearce mentioned that felt apt to this weird situation I found myself in. He writes:

Again, please don’t think for a second that I am putting my Esports World Cup news story in conversation with “democracy” and “demagoguery.” But it did feel as though the metaphorical flywheel broke down around my story — in ways that were hugely frustrating to me, a pedant.

One Reddit thread about my story was captioned: “[Mikhail Klimentov] Valorant will be included in the 2025 Esports World Cup.” Gah!¹ Some people in the comments then responded to the title of the thread, and not the content of the story — in part because the Reddit post didn’t link to the story itself, putting yet another barrier between the original work and an ordinary Redditor (someone who may hope to learn more about their favorite game via social media, but who is not necessarily terribly interested in chasing down primary sources). Perhaps even more frustratingly, the day my story published, I got a DM from a major Valorant news aggregator, who told me that “obviously” they would not share a link to my story, but that I was welcome to peddle my link under their post. Then, their actual tweet of the news was wrong. Should I be more relieved or upset that they didn’t link out? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ok, that’s it from me. Please let me know what you think — comments are open, and I can be reached by email. Otherwise, I’m happy to leave this source of agita in 2024.

Have a lovely New Years Eve!

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1. I do not entirely blame the person who made this post on Reddit, and I appreciate their instinct to share the news in the first place.