One of the greatest Western League of Legends players of all time, Luka ‘Perkz’ Perković, has retired.
The legendary esports pro took to social media to announce the news with a six-minute-long video in which he said:
“I’m retiring from playing competitively. I’m retiring at 26 years old. It sounds crazy, but it’s esports.”
“I think the reasons are very straightforward. There is just no time allocation, and all the bad things that come with stress from competing that I don’t want to manage anymore.”
The Croatian is one of the most decorated LoL players from Europe, only his former teammate Rasmus ‘Caps’ Winther has more trophies.
Perkz won eight LEC trophies with G2 Esports and famously role-swapped from mid lane to ADC so Caps could join the team.
Together in 2019, they historically won MSI – Europe’s first international trophy since the inaugural Worlds in 2011 – and also reached that year’s World Championship final.
Perkz is one of only a few players to have won trophies in both Europe and North America after winning an LCS title with Cloud9.
He also played for Team Vitality and Team Heretics, but Perkz finished his career on a UK esports team after joining Ruddy Sack.
The retirement announcement comes a day after Perkz revealed that he and his wife are expecting their first child.
With that news in mind, Perkz says he is ready to move on from his playing days:
“This has been a wonderful, wonderful journey. I’m also very happy to put it behind me. Life is great.
“The one thing that’s very rarely spoken about is that competition can be hard. While the highs are very high, the lows are very low.”
While Perkz is going to concentrate on becoming a father, he hasn’t written off returning to esports in some way.
He mentioned wanting to ‘lurk in the shadows’ and teach up-and-coming pros how to take Europe back to its glory days.
And then speaking on his Twitch stream, Perkz told fans he wants to help develop esports in his home country, saying:
“I’ll be working on bettering the Tier 2/Tier 3 scene, making esports bigger in Croatia and the Balkans.”
The Balkans may need the help after PGL announced it was moving its CS2 event out of Serbia due to unforeseen logistical challenges.”
On that same stream, Perkz also told a fun story about how former Fnatic support Zdravets “Hylissang” Iliev Galabov indirectly caused him to roleswap:
“Hjarnan did not play Xayah, fun fact. Or Kai’Sa. That is only reason I wanted to play AD, because I was thinking to myself how does the f*ck does my AD Carry not play the two most OP ADCs in the game?
“So when I would get autofilled to ADC, I would play Xayah and Kai’Sa, obviously. That’s why I was so good at Xayah and Kai’Sa. I needed to see how these champs that are so broken are not being piloted in my bot lane.
“Anyways, I queued one game, I played Xayah, I didn’t know who my support was, he was Rakan. It was Hylissang’s smurf account, he added me after the game, and he told me ‘wow Perkz, your Xayah is better than every LEC Xayah.’
“So basically, Hylissang actually planted a seed of me role-swapping to ADC. That was in Spring 2018. Uma Jan, that all happened because of Hylissang.”
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
