WePlay Holding lands agreement to broadcast the Brawl Stars Championship

WePlay Holding, a media holding firm and esports event organizer, has been named as the Russian-language broadcast host of the Brawl Stars Championship in 2021.

WePlay Holding specializes in hosting and broadcasting professional esports tournaments such as Dota 2, CSGO, and League of Legends. They have been hosting the League of Legends Russian Federation Championship for over a decade and the World Electronic Sports Games since 2017.

Chief Visionary Officer and Producer at WePlay Esports, Maksym Bilonogov, said, “For us, this is the first experience broadcasting mobile gaming tournaments, and we intend to explore Brawl Stars in more depth.

This is building on an earlier agreement between Brawl Stars developer Supercell USA and WePlay Holding for Russian-language broadcasts of Brawl Stars Masters 2019 next March.

This will be the second major partnership between Brawl Stars and a Russian-language esports organization after the StarLadder company signed up as the official Russian broadcaster for Brawl Stars esports.

Supercell’s first foray into non-English language esports will tap into an untapped market at large. While the English-speaking countries have already claimed their stake in esports, Russia is just starting to ramp up its investment. The region has seen League of Legends-based Riot Games offices grow to 800 employees in Moscow, including a development studio that is adding 60 new positions this year according to Riot’s VP of Esports, Whalen Rozelle.

In fact, the country is quickly building a strong base of competitive players and teams. According to a 2018 report from Esports Earnings, a London-based esports research firm, the Russian region is home to over 1.5 million viewers of esports content on Twitch and additional millions of active viewers on sites such as YouTube every month. League of Legends is by far the most popular game in Russia; with an 80% market share in 2018 according to Riot’s own numbers.