Riot to end League of Legends Classic after less than six months
The retro mode recreating League of Legends’ early years ends on 6 January 2027. Riot says many players have gone back to the regular game.
Archive image · Photo: Bruce Liu / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped and resized)
Riot Games is shutting down League of Legends Classic. The mode, which recreates the game as it was in Seasons 1 to 4, only launched on 29 July 2026 and, according to Insider Gaming, ends on 6 January 2027 with the close of the year’s third season. Excitement was high at launch, but since then many players, as the dev team put it according to Engadget, “have gone back to other parts of League”.
Riot is making changes before the shutdown: in regions with long queue times, such as Korea, Latin America, Turkey and Oceania, the mode can only be played in set time windows, and in Japan and the MENA region only in custom matches from Patch 26.21. At the same time more champions will be added through Patch 26.23. Riot will refund purchases such as Classic chromas and portraits in Riot Points by 30 November 2026.
Classic is not meant to disappear for good: Riot wants to bring the mode back based on this first run, “likely as an event mode with adjustments and additions”, Engadget reports.