League of Legends is known for its massive universe with hundreds of champions, characters, locations and events. In the past Riot's creation was a true merchandising machine, releasing tons of products, like shirts and figures. But for quite some time now, there hasn't been anything big in the store. Now the community is complaining about the sad downfall.
Many people want to show the world, what they like or what they stand for. Otherwise, the huge amount of merchandise for nearly everything can't be explained. Especially in sports, merch like shirts, posters or flags are commonly seen in the stadiums and arenas all over the world.
As you can imagine the same goes for gamers and their favorite games, players, streamers or esports teams. Well, League of Legends offers every single one of these, a sometimes addictive game, many in-game characters, several leagues with big teams and names and a huge fan base across the globe. So for a very long time LoL was an absolute merchandise machine.
But now many community members are unhappy about the merch output. What happened?
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LoL: 2023 The Year Without Big Merchandise
For years, you could buy whatever you could imagine as merch in the League of Legends Store - Shirts, collectible figures, keychains, posters of your favorite champion and their skins and so on. But the merch output of Riot Games has lacked in the last little bit, as several fans pointed out in a now viral thread on the League of Legends Subreddit.
Merch Drought 2023 by u/KalisQinsSais in leagueoflegends
In this thread, the user "KalisQinsSais" asked what happened to the Riot merchandise department,
What has happened to the Riot Merchandise department? The last “new” poster that was added to the store is from the 2022 - star guardian event. The last champion poster has been Zeri. No summer event (biggest budget in history) merchandise - clothing line, accessories, statues - has been released. Is it a demand thing? Are people just not interested in merchandise or what is going on there?
According to the many answers the user received in the comment section, he is by far not the only one wondering what happened to the LoL merchandising. The community member "Lululaby" took a short look in the past and compared it to the modern times,
This is sadly not a '2023 Merch Drought' thing it's just that you've only noticed now.The Viego event in 2021 and last years Star Guardian event also came with very little to no merch. There is no Sentinel clothing line merch or figurines at all. While for Spirit Blossom 2020 there was loads of plushies, shirts, hoodies, figurines, accessories, pins and mousepads. Excluding Posters this comes down to about 28 merch items. While for the Sentinel event in 2021, excluding posters, there's 1 shirt and a keycap. That's it. Pretty much the same is the case for the Star Guardian event last year.
The user "manofchance" meanwhile, analyzed the current stash of apparel in the store and came to an interesting conclusion,
League only seems to care about statues anymore in the store. I swear half the apparel is from like pre-2020. Or they just outsource it to like a computer chair or smart watch band company. League should think about short-run merch if they're worried about getting stuck with a bunch of stuff like they have with some of those old "2017 msi" shirts they still have in the store.
And the user "TheAnnibal" had another interesting fact about the merchandising policy of Riot Games,
90% of that merch is Riot CN or KR designs at this point and the west is getting it 6-12 months later, so zero effort on that front (while before, plushies and unlocked were almost worldwide releases). They also rotated sales often in the EU and NA stores, but we had a 14 month streak where the on sale items were still stuff from Worlds 2020 and 2021... in 2023.
Well, it seems to be the case that the costs for production, storage and shipping might not be worth for Riot Games at the moment. Especially compared to other "merchandise articles" like skins or chromas. Maybe the selling numbers have dwindled as LoL has reached his highest point of player numbers and attention.
It will be interesting to see, if and how Riot will react to this, but apparently the company is currently happy with its merch policies. And let's be honest here, there is till a huge amount of stuff in the game's store, and surely they will release new merch in the future.
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