Pre-release Riot Games's founders Brandon Beck and Marc Merill had an idea for a spiritual successor to
Defense of the Ancients, known as
DotA. A
mod for
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos,
DotA required players to buy
Warcraft III and install custom software;
The Washington Post Brian Crecente said the mod "lacked a level of polish and was often hard to find and set up". Phillip Kollar of
Polygon noted that
Blizzard Entertainment supported
Warcraft III with an
expansion pack, then shifted their focus to other projects while the game still had players. Beck and Merill sought to create a game that would be supported over a significantly longer period. Beck and Merill held a
DotA tournament for students at the
University of Southern California, with an ulterior goal of recruitment. There they met Jeff Jew, later a producer on
League of Legends. Jew was very familiar with
DotA and spent much of the tournament teaching others how to play. Beck and Merill invited him to an interview, and he joined Riot Games as an intern. Feak said early development was highly iterative, comparing it to designing
DotA. A demonstration of
League of Legends built in the
Warcraft III game engine was completed in four months and then shown at the 2007
Game Developers Conference.
Closed beta-testing began in April 2009. Upon the launch of the beta, 17 champions were available. Riot initially aimed to ship the game with 20 champions but doubled the number before the game's full release in North America on October 27, 2009. The game's full name was announced as
League of Legends: Clash of Fates. Riot planned to use the subtitle to signal when future content was available, but decided it was silly and dropped it before launch.'' These updates change the effectiveness of strategies within the game, known as the
metagame; update content is determined by the developer using a combination of gameplay data and product goals. The development team includes hundreds of game designers and artists. In 2016, the music team had four full-time composers and a team of producers creating audio for the game and its promotional materials. , the game has 172 champions, and Riot Games periodically overhauls the visuals and gameplay of the oldest in the roster. Although only available for Microsoft Windows at launch, a
Mac version of the game was made available in 2013. Since May 2023, the game uses Riot's custom always-online anti-cheat software,
Vanguard, on Microsoft Windows devices. Originally developed by Riot for its tactical shooter
Valorant (2020), Vanguard requires access to the device's
kernel, which some users saw as unnecessarily intrusive. Vanguard does not collect user data or send it to Riot Games. Following the anti-cheat's deployment, some players said Vanguard
bricked their devices. The developer said this was caused by other problems, with only 0.03% of players reporting issues. The same day, the League of Legends team published a video responding to the report, and saying they intended to replace the game's client, improve onboarding for new users, and overhaul visuals. Both the report and video emphasised Riot's intention to make the game more beginner-friendly.
Revenue model League of Legends uses a
free-to-play business model. Revenue is generated by selling cosmetic goods with no impact to gameplay. Several of these cosmetics—for example, "skins" that change the appearance of champions—can be redeemed after purchasing an
in-game currency called Riot Points (RP). As virtual goods, they have high
profit margins. A 2016 analysis by
SuperData estimated the game's monthly revenues at $150 million per month. At the 2024
Summer Game Fest, game director Pu Liu said that revenue is primarily generated by a "single-digit percentage" of players, colloquially known as whales. Skins have five basic tiers, ranging in cost from $4 to $25. Riot Games added an additional skin tier to
League of Legends in 2024, describing them as a
luxury good. These skins cannot be purchased outright: instead, players buy attempts to win the skin via a
slot machine. Some commentators identified this as a
gacha game mechanic, used by Riot since 2023 in
Teamfight Tactics. Players are guaranteed to acquire the skin after a predefined number of failed attempts. The cost can range from $200 to $430. The first was criticized for being a recolored variant of an existing skin, known as a "chroma". The developer released several more of these, One day after revealing a $430 "Hall of Fame" skin to honor the career of professional gamer
Faker, Riot announced layoffs at the company, impacting Ben Rosado—the cosmetic's designer—and eliciting further negative responses from players. In early 2025, Riot announced a new skin in the tier that had been long requested by players.
PC Gamer Rick Lane described the strategy as "whale chasing" and "psychological manipulation". He said that the skins had been selected to "subtly" entice players into "rolling the dice", at which point the
sunk-cost fallacy takes over. Lane described it as the latest in a series of monetization controversies for the developer. In November 2024, the studio said they would streamline player rewards in an upcoming patch, describing the game's various progression tracks and currencies as "needlessly complex". The announcement caused widespread outrage. A viral
Reddit post estimated that free-to-play players must play the game for over 800 hours to unlock a single champion. It was described by
GamesRadar+ as the studio's "worst PR disaster in years". In mid-January 2025, game director Andrei van Room said they had "screwed up", explaining that a designer forgot to include the "first win of the day" experience bonus in their calculations, causing unintended consequences. The developer partially reverted some of the changes, including halving the cost of purchasing a champion, and the return of "hextech chests"—a
loot box system introduced in 2016. These are purchasable virtual "chests" that provide random cosmetics, a practice that has been criticized as a form of gambling.
Plot Before 2014, players existed in-universe as political leaders, or "Summoners", commanding champions to fight on the Fields of Justice—for example, Summoner's Rift—to avert a catastrophic war. Sociologist Matt Watson said the plot and setting were bereft of the political themes found in other
role-playing games, and presented in reductive "good versus evil" terms. In the game's early development, Riot did not hire writers, and designers wrote character biographies only a paragraph long. Luke Plunkett wrote for
Kotaku that, although the change would upset long-term fans, it was necessary as the game's player base grew in size. Shortly after the reboot, Riot hired
Warhammer writer
Graham McNeill. Riot's storytellers and artists create
flavor text, adding "richness" to the game, but very little of this is seen as a part of normal gameplay. Instead, that work supplies a foundation for the franchise's expansion into other media, == Reception ==