Buffalo Wild Wings and LCS Promotion

After having visited a Local “Buffalo Wild Wings” with my friends over the weekend, one of the items on the menu caught my attention. The item offered on the menu was a combo meal labeled the “LCS wing Bundle”; a wing bundle of 10 boneless wings, fries, Red Bull, and an exclusive “Hextech Chest and Key”. The LCS bundle was a collaboration effort between Buffalo Wild Wings and the biggest annual E-Sport event known as the League Championship Series or LCS. Likewise, the meal provides the “hex tech chest and keys” as exclusive items that can be redeemed in the online game League of Legends, and in essence, the bundled meal was a promotion for the upcoming LCS event of that year.

While this Collaboration between a video game event and buffalo wild wings seems out of the ordinary, it is actually a very “ordinary” collaboration. This collaboration is ordinary as the menu’s promotional item is seeking to draw in a demographic of video gamers, specifically League of Legends players. And with an audience, Buffalo wild wings serves as a great sports bar that not only caters to regular sporting events but also draws in the e-sporting scene. In this manner, the efforts made by both the LCS and Buffalo Wild Wings seem to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the fast-growing scene in the E-Sports Domain, in a mutually beneficial relationship. The relationship between E-Sports and Buffalo Wild Wings is mutually beneficial, as (from buffalo wild wings' perspective), promoting LCS E-Sports will bring about a greater range of audience (Younger demographic) to their establishments, as well as starting an early step in branding themselves as sports bars open to not only physical sports but also Electronic sports. On the other hand, the LCS bundle promotion also benefits the E-Sports community greatly, as the promotion seeks to assimilate E-Sports into the greater genre of sports.

Aside from this brief analysis and outline, another speculation that can be observed in this Buffalo Wild Wings Collaboration would be the advent of the met-averse. In this case, money that is spent purchasing physical food at a restaurant can in turn be redeemed into online gaming products. And while this ability for gaming products to be purchased with real money has been around already, it is arguable that having money as an intermediary for purchasing a physical (Wings) and a nonphysical item (Gaming tokens) is phenomenologically linking the physical with the nonphysical.

Put differently, unlike before - how the physical dollar can be altered into a new form of online gaming currency to purchase products - the buffalo wild wings bundle allows the individual access to purchase physical products in accordance with an immaterial redeemable item. Such that the dollar in its “fiat form” is no longer traded for another “digital fiat”, but rather it is traded for a combination of primal goods (that is food) and “digital fiat”, drawing the two different realms (The naturalist world that is the dollar and food with the meta world that is the gaming world) together. In this sense, I believe that this is an advancement in creating the meta-verse, as no longer is there a drastic difference between the physical and nonphysical, there is a shift (though it may be gradual) towards linking the two.