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Update (February 26th 2025): Hextech Chests are returning to League of Legends as Riot confirms u-turn.
Original article (published February 9th 2025): The League of Legends (LoL) community has been vocal about Riot’s decision to remove free Hextech Chests from the game, and its explanation why.
Hextech Chests, which were previously available by playing the game, and contained either skin shards, champion shards, ward skin shards, summonier icons, plus emotes and orange essence, were recently removed as a free option, in favour of offering skins via the game’s Battle Pass system. The full Battle Pass cost is 1,650RP (around £13).
In response to complaints by some of the LoL playerbase, Riot took the time to speak about its decision to remove them.
While some may have thought Riot would u-turn on its decision, it doubled down and explained why free Hextech chests are being removed.
Riot’s explanation around Hextech Chests removal in full
In the latest League of Legends dev update, Riot spoke about Hextech Chests, and earning skins instead of buying them.
Andrei ‘Meddler’ van Roon, Head of League Studio at Riot Games, said: “Our belief as a company is that delivering great experiences for you will lead to great results for Riot. We want to deliver the best experience we can, that you can play forever without spending anything.
“So that you only spend money when you think we’ve made something great that you want to spend money on.”
Paul ‘Pabro’ Bellezza, Executive Producer of League of Legends at Riot, added: “As a free-to-play game, skins are the primary way League pays its bills. They’re what gives us the ability to continue to develop the game and wider ecosystem, from adding new game modes to updates to Summoner’s Rift, cinematics, live events like Worlds patch to patch balance, and much longer-term investments in League for the future.
“The number of people playing League has been pretty stable over recent years, and we’re really grateful for that. Our cost to maintain and develop League has also been pretty stable over time too.
“Ensuring we have an equally sustainable income coming into reinvest in the game, however, has been frankly more of a recent challenge.”
Meddler said: “That’s where free Hextech Chests come in. When we initially added them, we wanted to offer additional reward for time spent using something we knew many of you really cared about earning: skins. And for a while, we think that worked well for both players and the business side of League.
“Over time, free chests unintentionally became the primary way to unlock skins, and an increasing number of players ended up with substantial skin collections for free. This meant that purchasing skins directly didn’t make sense anymore to a lot of players, because they were happy just waiting to get something eventually. That did lead to a great player experience, but it was not sustainable for League in the long term.”
Riot Meddler
“So we took a step back to evaluate League’s reward systems, and realised we needed to make changes to be sustainable for the long run,” added Pabro. “We didn’t want to go all the way back to the early days of League, with no skins earned with play time at all, but we also realised we couldn’t continue giving away as many as we were.
“We did a number of other things to ensure League’s business was sustainable before concluding we needed to give away fewer skins.
“Increasing the number of skins we can make each year was good for both the business and the player experience, but eventually, we ran into meaningful, diminishing returns.
“We introduced premium cosmetics, we’ve also explored a lot of other cosmetic content types, and we’ll keep trying to do so. But champion skins are clearly the thing most of you care about more than anything else when it comes to cosmetics. And obviously, adding pay-for-power content is a non-starter for us.”
Meddler continued: “We know some of you aren’t interested in the business side of things, or even cosmetics in general, and that others won’t believe this isn’t about increasing profit year over year.
“This is about ensuring the sustainable long-term health of League, though, and we do hope this is helpful context for those of you who’ve been wondering what our thinking was with this change.
“We want to ensure League remains that great, fully free-to-play game. We believe a change like this, while unpopular, is the right call and allows us to deliver not just on our plans today, but also our plans for League in the future.
“We’ll be sure to give you more context on the thinking behind changes to skins and any other related systems in the future as well. We’re currently doing a lot of global surveying and discussion with players about what is and isn’t working.”
The pair also spoke about improvements to Battle Pass skins, 2025 LoL Season One gameplay, Swiftplay, Arena, Season 2 for 2025 and other updates.
You can see all this in the latest dev update on YouTube here:
Some of the other highlights from the Season One Check-In include:
- Battle Pass skins will be improved with more distinct visual effects and model updates. In the future, unlocking Battle Pass skins will also unlock the champion for players that don’t already own them and, going forward, Battle Pass skins may deviate from the season’s theme to allow for more variety.
- Certain unpopular or difficult Battle Pass missions will be removed or reworked and the amount of XP that Teamfight Tactics contributes to League’s Battle Pass will be increased.
- Introduced at the beginning of the season, Feats of Strength were a bit rough around the edges. Adjustments, including the changing of Feat of Warfare from First Blood to first three kills, have helped move them to a more stable state.
- Snowballing in games is around equal to where it was before the start of the new season. The team will continue to monitor and finetune this balance, but overall, the changes are moving the game in the intended direction.
- Voracious Atkakhan’s rewards have proven to be too strong and game warping. Starting next patch, the withdrawal time will be increased to 15 seconds.
- Updates to the Noxian Rift are coming in Act 2 following player feedback that the map feels too dark or visually straining.
- A new Riot dev blog on Season One changes released today, providing a deeper dive into how the Season 1 changes are shaping the game.
- Swiftplay far exceeded expectations and successfully hit the goals of running shorter than Summoner’s Rift games, reducing snowballing, and allowing players to hit their full builds more often.
- Adjustments to minion scaling, tower resistances, and more have been made to help prevent overly long matches.
- The team is also looking into improvements to matchmaking and lobbies for premade groups.
LoL community reacts to removal of free Hextech Chests
Several Reddit posts have been made about the change.
“This is almost the same mistake Blizzard made with Overwatch 2,” one Reddit user said.
“‘League is dead/will die’ is a term commonly thrown around whenever someone quits the game, but for the first time League seems to be in actual danger of just losing too many players to keep up.”
This redditor mentioned the context prior to free Hextech Chests’ removal and the other changes Riot has made.
Many others posted comments on Reddit and Twitter too.
Others were not bothered by Riot’s decision.
UK streamer Dragdar said:
Agurin added:
Whatley, a UK streamer competing in the UKEL, said:
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Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
