League of Legends gets an Apple Watch app

You can now wear League of Legends stats on your wrist.

Scout Ahead is a new Apple Watch app (although you can get it on the iPhone as well) that enables League of Legends players to get important information before their matches in the megapopular multiplayer online arena battler. Developer Pixile Studios developed the smartwatch program to give players an idea of what to expect from their opponents. As each match loads, Scout Ahead starts streaming data and statistics about the people you are playing against. The company claims this is an easy way to quickly get an early advantage in the competitive game.

This is the latest way that developers are trying to integrate gaming with the Apple Watch. While most attempts up until this point have tried to put full-fledged games onto the device, this approach — which acts as a supplement to a PC game — could light a different path that more studios might consider in the future.

If you’re wondering how Scout Ahead works, it is plugged into the new application program interface (API) for League of Legends that developer Riot just launched recently. This enables the app to quickly grab data about live matches as they happen. This is the same tech that makes League of Legends fantasy sports sites like Vulcun work.

“The app provides stats direct from Riot’s new API that go well beyond what you get inside the game itself,” Pixile Studios cofounder Michael Silverwood told GamesBeat. “[These include] the runes, masteries, wins/losses, and ranks of your opponents, so it can help a lot to give you an idea of who you’re playing against.”

In addition to the Apple Watch app, Pixile Studio is — of course — also releasing Scout Ahead for iPhones. So if you’re not quite ready to strap a computer to your body, you can always bring up all the extra League of Legends data on your smartphone.

For now, Pixile is only planning on rolling out an app for League of Legends, but if it catches on, we could see similar smartwatch and smartphone software that enables us to do this for other games that have high-powered APIs.