Riot Games announces League of Legends Season 3 World Championships to be held at Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.

League of Legends developer Riot Games has announced that the World Championship finals for season 3 of its global eSports tournament will be taking place at the Staples Center, home of the Los Angeles Lakers and Kings. Over 10,000 people are expected to attend the final match in the League of Legends tournament on Friday, October 4.

The University of Southern California's Galen Center will hold the start of the group stages on September 16. The Galen Center hosted the Season 2 grand finals last year, to an audience of 7,000 spectators at the venue and over 8.2m spectators online.

Qualifiers for each of the regions are taking place soon, with the North American and European matches occurring in late August at PAX Prime and Gamescom respectively. Following the qualifiers, 14 teams from Korea, China, Southeast Asia, Europe, North America, and an international wild-card team will fly to Los Angeles to compete in the semi-finals through both a group stage and a two round single-elimination stage for the $2m prize pool.

The world championship prize pool is expected to bring the total sum of League of Legends prize money for Season 3 to over $8m globally, with $1m going to the championship's winning team.

The Season 3 finals are expected to beat the 18 million unique viewer peak of the recent League of Legends All-Star tournament, held in Shanghai in May.

Tickets will be available soon at lolesports.com and through other various ticketing outlets. GameSpot will be covering the event, so be sure to check out the GameSpot eSports hub.

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