Riot put a 500 RP price on League Classic's retro champion models, then made all 60 free three days later

What Happened

Riot put a price on the way champions used to look. It lasted three days.

League of Legends Classic went up at the MSI 2026 finals broadcast and got its real explanation in a July 14 dev blog and dev update video. It launches July 29 alongside Patch 26.15, and it is the old game rather than a skin line: 60 champions in their pre-rework kits, the old runes and masteries, the old items and summoner spells, and a rebuilt Summoner's Rift. The roster is the original 40 plus 20 more that shipped between 2009 and 2013. A public beta has been live since the 14th.

The classic skins are the 2009 to 2013 champion models. Not a new take on the old art, the old art. A handful came free. The other 56 you either earned through the Classic Pass or bought at 500 RP each, about $5 a champion. Outlets ran the arithmetic and landed near $250 for the full set.

The objection took one sentence: players were being charged for what used to be the champion's default appearance.

It didn't help that the pass and the RP price covered the same 56 models. Two ways to pay for one thing, and no way to just have it.

On July 17 the official League of Legends account posted a follow-up video on classic skins, gameplay and champion kits. Brian "FeralPony" Feeney, a game director inside Riot R&D, delivered the reversal in it. All 60 classic skins are unlocked for free, and they are now the default look for every champion that has one.

Riot's "Classic, Mayhem & More" dev update from July 14, which laid out the original plan. (Riot Games)

The Details

Classic restores the parts of old League that people argue about at length. Flat stat runes you buy and slot across 20 pages before you queue. The Offense, Defense and Utility mastery trees, where 21/0/9 was a thing players said out loud. Those systems are why the skins mattered so much to the pitch: the whole product is sold on being the thing you remember, down to the art.

What This Means for the Riot MMO

Classic is being built inside Riot R&D. That is the same org the unannounced MMO sits in, under the "Unpublished R&D Product" label its job listings carry, and Feeney's title is R&D game director. So this isn't a read across the company from a distance. The group that just walked back a pricing call its audience rejected is the group building the MMO.

Riot has never put a business model on the record for the MMO. The only monetization statements that exist belong to Greg Street, they date to 2022, he said plainly that nothing was final, and he left Riot in March 2023, a year before the project was reset in March 2024. Nobody at Riot has promised you anything about how the MMO charges. What exists is a track record, and it just picked up a data point: three days from reveal to reversal.

The speed matters more than the row. A skin argument on a limited-time mode is one bad week. An MMO cosmetic shop sits under that same pressure every patch for as long as the game runs, and Aion 2 has already drawn the subscription and no-pay-to-win line Riot's MMO gets measured against. What Classic tells us is narrower and more useful: R&D read the reaction and moved in 72 hours instead of waiting out the news cycle.

The line it landed on is the one an MMO shop has to find on day one. Selling additions is normal. Selling back the appearance a character already had reads as taking something away, and players priced that difference immediately. Blizzard spent years learning the same thing the expensive way, one store item at a time.

Any nostalgia product carries an expectation problem too, and the unannounced MMO is built on the same bet that people want the old thing back. Sell someone their own memory and they behave like they already own it. That isn't entitlement, it's the deal you make when the pitch is "this is how it was." WoW Classic has refused to die for exactly that reason, and the players it kept are the least tolerant of a shop that charges for the baseline.

One thing about the MMO is confirmed, and it's the only thing: it's set in Runeterra. Not which regions. Not how much of the map. Not the era, the platform, or how it charges. None of that has been revealed. The world below is the fiction Riot gets to draw on, not a starting zone.

What that world looks like at full budget is not a mystery, though. The 2019 season cinematic is the clearest single piece of it.

Every champion on that classic skin select screen already lives somewhere in it. Ahri belongs to Ionia, Katarina to Noxus, Ezreal to Piltover, Ashe to the Freljord. Leona came down off Targon, and Gangplank is a Bilgewater problem.

That is why the row isn't really about cosmetics. The 2011 models Riot nearly charged for are the same characters an MMO would put in front of you as residents of those places rather than as portraits in champion select, and Riot's co-founder has been personally selling the card set that fleshes that Runeterra out. The people who show up for a world at this level are the same ones who watched the old-school MMO Riot walked away from get rebuilt in public, one hand-placed zone at a time. They pay close attention to what is for sale and what is just there.

Regions of Runeterra. Riot has not said which of them the MMO uses.

Your Take

Reported from Riot Games / League of Legends and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.