League of Legends maker Riot Games has stopped work on its Twitch rival.
That’s according to Bloomberg, which reports that the initiative – dubbed Riot Esports Network (REN) – has been cancelled. This news comes following Riot cutting around 530 jobs, about 11 per cent of its staff.
“We were testing some watch platform ideas but opted to cancel our initiative REN last week,” the firm’s president of esports, John Needham, wrote in a statement.
REN was never officially announced, but last year in a blog post, Needham said that Riot was looking to improve its existing solution for watching esports – lolesports.com – though this was just an embedded player from Twitch or YouTube.
“We’re now developing our watch platform to go even further and evolve it into an advanced commerce platform that we can use to sell digital goods and services directly to our fans through our broadcasts,” he wrote.
“Ultimately, we want to combine this commerce capability with everything we know about our players to sell digital goods and services that are valuable to a viewer.”
REN was in-part fueled by Riot’s acquisition of a startup called Kanga back in 2021.