Fantasy League of Legends is Coming Back, But Not Until 2020
By Wyatt Fossett ·
It's been months since Riot Games shut down Fantasy LoL and almost as long since anyone has officially spoken on the matter, the fans wanted info and today Commissioner Greeley gave it to them.
In a blog post today, the LCS Commissioner Chris Greeley went into some details regarding the potential return of Fantasy League of Legends. The good news is that it’s coming back. The not-so-great news is that it won’t happen until next year, at the earliest.
“I wanted to give a long overdue update on Fantasy and before you get your expectations too high – fantasy isn’t returning for Summer 2019,” wrote Commissioner Greeley.
In his post, Greeley goes into details regarding the success of Fantasy LoL when it first launched, and how it quickly crumbled. “As time went on, new fantasy products and ideas emerged, but we didn’t keep pace,” says Greeley. “As the fantasy experience began to feel stale, people stopped playing.”
Those that loved playing Fantasy League of Legends -- much like Fantasy sports, but with League of Legends pro scenes and players -- have been very vocal since the extracurricular service and fun shutdown. “The players who were using Fantasy were devoted and passionate about it, but that the universe was really small,” writes Greeley.
As for the future of the service, it’s all still uncertain, though the team is hoping that Fantasy will come back to League of Legends by the 2020 Spring Split. How? Well, it seems that Riot Games now understands that running a Fantasy experience is a whole lot of work. “Fantasy isn’t our business,” says Greeley. So, they are actively seeking someone else to run the show.
“We have had long discussions over the past year with big fantasy providers and daily fantasy providers, as well as companies that are in the League community and could develop fantasy as a companion to their existing products,” says Commissioner Greeley on the blog post. “None of these have been a fit. Some groups didn’t think they could rebuild the user base, some wanted a lot of money to try, and others wanted to move to different fantasy models that we didn’t think would have good long term appeal.”
Looking ahead, there’s a lot of life to be had for a very solid Fantasy experience in the competitive League of Legends world. Even smaller audiences like Halo found a solid product in Fantasy HCS for a while before acquisition stacking lost that product in the shuffle. That being said, there’s no reason to push Riot Games to develop and release a Fantasy product that isn’t exactly what the crowd deserves. Commissioner Greeley feels the same.
“Our goal is still to produce something head and shoulders above the product we shut down last year. We’re pursuing a plan to do that and have something great in your hands for Spring 2020.” ends Greeley, before promising another (possibly brief) update on the status of Fantasy LoL by July 15th.
With the start of the LCS 2019 Summer Split literally days away, some fans are understandably unhappy with the lack of communication regarding Fantasy LoL over the past few months, but it looks like this is a product and project that the internal team cares about very much, which almost exclusively produces better results.
Who’s excited to get some Fantasy Esports action going when the updated version of Fantasy LoL arrives eventually?