In a blog post today, Unikrn CEO Rahul Sood announced he’d sponsor any League of Legends team that has a female player on its roster.

He said he’s disappointed by the lack of female role models for his daugher, who is “an amazing League of Legends player.” Sood added that his daughter doesn’t play at a pro level but he wonders if she could have turned pro if she’d had a female role model in the game.

Sood made the announcement in his blog today: “So I’m going to make a public call here. Unikrn will sponsor any professional LCS team with a woman on it. I will do whatever we can to help promote and connect that team with other brands that I currently work with and have worked with in the past. That’s my personal commitment. This isn’t a gimmick, this is an effort to make a difference in a space that I can control.”

LCS is the League of Legends Championship Series, a game competition put on by Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends.

League of Legends is one of the largest eSports franchises, with some teams winning prizes of a million dollars. As eSports become a multi-million dollar industry like other sports—and as some colleges begin to offer eSports scholarships—it’s good to see a prominent figure like Mr. Sood encouraging female participation.


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Linda learned to play video games as a way to connect with her teenaged kids, and then she learned to love video games for their own sake. At Pixelkin she wrangles the business & management side of things, writes posts as often as she can, reaches out on the social media, and does the occasional panel or talk. She lives in Seattle, where she writes, studies, plays video games, spends time with her family, consumes vast quantities of science fiction, and looks after her small cockapoo. She loves to hear from people out there. You can read more about her at her website, Linda Breneman.com or her family foundation's website, ludusproject.org.