“China is a priority for us”, says Marc Merrill, president of the upstart LA-based company Riot Games. His studio’s debut title, League of Legends, has just secured a licensing partnership with Tencent Inc, one of the biggest companies in China’s internet service sector.  “We will pay very close attention to the territory,” he says.

Though Merrill is careful to add that the company will not be focusing on China alone, the region boasts a mushrooming audience of eager online gamers – an audience vast enough to sustain any business that is able to tap into its conscience. Merrill is confident that Riot’s upcoming League of Legends (pictured), an online-RPG based on a Warcraft Mod (more), has the ability to captivate the nation’s vast gaming audience.

“League of Legends has a competitive focus and many Chinese players love to play competitively. It will run on a variety of hardware specs – you will not need bleeding-edge technology in order to run League of Legends and have it look great on your machine, and our art style and character design is not of the traditional western Tolkeinesque lexicon and is well suited for a gamers around the world,” he says. Though the game’s burgeoning Chinese-centricity will no doubt help Riot mark its name in the region, the deal with Tencent is crucial.

Tencent will distribute Riot's first title to the company’s growing 300 million internet userbase through its QQ Game portal. The deal is one of only a handful of partnerships which bring a US-developed online game direct to China, though if it proves a success  such deals will surely grow in quantity.

“The Tencent deal is a very important deal for a new company like us for a number of reasons.  Signing a deal with a such a strong player in China adds a significant amount of credibility to our company and demonstrates that League of Legends is shaping up to be a game that has great international potential.”

“China is a huge online game market that provides a great amount of opportunity that many products unfortunately don't get to leverage. China's growth has been tremendous and will continue to be rapid for some time.”

New details on League of Legends’ price and release remain elusive. The company will be inviting players for the beta in 2009.