The League of Legends community is currently in turmoil as Riot Games has made significant changes in order to tamp down on the amount of things you can get in the game for free, specifically, the removal of free Hextech Chests.
These chests were previously used as mechanisms to earn free skins until Riot removed them, and now their explanation is that this gave players…too many skins for free, which is of course not what players want to hear. Riot speaks plainly about how this is bad for business in a new video:
The highlights here are:
- Free chests became the primary way for players to get skins.
- This lead to large collections of free skins among many players.
- That led to players buying fewer and fewer skins, creating “meaningful diminishing returns.”
- This has directly affected the game’s profit and while it was “a great player experience” is “not sustainable in the long term.”
You may be able to see the logic here, as if a F2P game is giving away too much stuff for free and not selling enough to sustain development, they might do something like this. But releasing this video after making the change quietly is not great and simply put, many players are just not buying this. A “ratio” reaction under the video says a lot:
“The game is falling into a pit, and you’re doing nothing to prevent it; in fact, you’re contributing to it with every decision you make. Free Hextech Chests removed, mediocre Battle Passes, terrible skin quality, overpriced skins, Mythic Essence now being “premium,” gacha system, horrible game balance, horrible matchmaking, disgusting client, eloboosting/smurfs/toxicity allowed, things no longer made with love, and countless more issues.”
It is also not lost on League players that Riot has spoken openly about how much its TV show Arcane has cost, and how they’re moving forward with more shows despite this. That series reportedly cost $250 million to produce, but Riot execs said they did not particularly care. The quote in question from Riot’s Marc Merrill.
“These people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins, when in reality we sell skins to make things like Arcane…Do we get everything right? Nope, but we are not focused on the short term extraction of profits – we are focused on delivering exceptional value to our audience over the long term, again and again and again. To be clear, Arcane crushed it for players and so it crushed it for us.”
Arcane season 2
Netflix
As a player, viewing the company saying they want the game to fund shows, when they are now being asked to pay more to allegedly sustain the game itself, is certainly contradictory. Even internally, Riot employees are reportedly not enthused about the decision, especially since Riot has done a number of layoffs in recent years.
This is a mess for Riot and one that does not seem to be getting cleaned up any time soon, even if they’re not fully reverting the system and they’re offering this public explanation for it. For many players it doesn’t add up and combined with other money-grabs the game has implemented, Riot’s relationship with its community is fracturing pretty quickly over this. More so than usual, in any case.
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