After 5 years of self-funded development, the fan-made League of Legends game was bluntly canceled by Riot

The age of 10 years is odd, League of Legends has come a long way with a series of large and small tweaks to suit the trends and tastes of players. However, for nostalgic gamers, once again going back to the past with early game versions is always a constant wish. In the face of Riot’s indifference, a group of fans decided to make the Chronoshift project themselves, the purpose of recreating the old experiences of the game.

The development team had the idea and started developing the game for a few years before officially announcing it last year. What a pity, Riot Games disagreed with the project and sent a warning to the development team at the time: “We ask you not to do this. We have policies and regulations governing the development of products based on Riot’s games. Please read the rules on developer.riotgames.com.”
​

​

Despite that, Chronoshift continued to work until the end of last week when the Chronoshiftdev account posted a message stating that they had been contacted by a representative of Riot’s security department, asking the development team to “deliver all source code and website for the company”. The development team was of course extremely disappointed:

“We have been working on this project for almost 5 years and it took thousands of hours. We have never called for donations, all expenses are paid out of our own pocket. We even turned down people who offered to donate thousands of dollars to the project.”

Screenshots of the conversation between Riot representatives and the development team were also revealed. At first, Riot expressed his desire to “find a way to come to a happy ending for both of them” but after the development team seemed to disagree, Riot immediately announced: “Give us all the data we have. I ask, otherwise we will sue. I don’t want this to happen but if you want to go to court we are ready.” A Riot representative also confirmed that the company’s legal department has sent a letter to the Chronoshift developers to “formally ask them to stop developing the project.”

“Our stance on projects similar to Chronoshift has been made clear in section 3 of the Legal Guide. We understand that the Chronoshift team will be disappointed but this is something they should expect. We aim to solve the problem internally. We usually try to contact them to negotiate first, but in this case, the attitude of the Chronoshift development team forced us to be more aggressive.”

“Please note that Riot and the developers, designers, and company employees have taken a lot of time to bring interesting experiences to players. Unauthorized servers like Chronoshift harm Riot, its business, and its employees. Although we want to resolve the matter amicably, we emphasize that Riot is ready to take any drastic measures to protect the interests of the company, including litigation if necessary.”
​

​

The Chronoshift development team had no choice but to comply with the request despite their great displeasure: “We are extremely disappointed with the way Riot has chosen to handle this situation. Instead of caring about the community’s project, they went against it completely, even demanding legal action against us.” After all, it took 5 years and a lot of money to implement the project, Chronoshift still could not escape the fate of being canceled in regret.

For more hot news about the game, readers can Like and Follow Fanpage:​