LoL devs explain why free Hextech Chests were removed & players are furious
Riot Games/@hero_a15Going into Season 2025, Riot silently removed the ability to earn free Hextech Chests, something that players have never let them live down.
Pretty much every post on the League of Legends Twitter account, regardless of topic, has replies filled with players memeing the fact that they want Hextech Chests back.
These posts often drastically outperform Riot’s original tweet, with players coming together to collectively dunk on the company’s decision. Taking away something players previously had for free is never going to go over well, but it’s been particularly disastrous for Riot in terms of public sentiment.
So, in a dev update addressing the change, they gave a brutally honest answer: Yes, it was about the money.
Why were free Hextech Chests removed from LoL?
For a long time, players would strive to earn Hextech Chests to net themselves some free skins. The skin shards you’d get from the chests themselves were random, and it’d take a while to get something you’d actually want, but players were patient and willing to grind for some free loot.
However, Riot has since revealed that players waiting for skins rather than buying them when they released was a huge hit to their bottom line, resulting in the sudden change.
Players have taken this news about as well as you’d expect.
Here’s an excerpt from their explanation:
“As a free-to-play game, skins are the primary way League pays its bills. They’re what give us the ability to continue to develop the game and wider ecosystem,” explained Riot dev Pabro.
“The number of people playing League has been pretty stable over recent years, and we’re really grateful for that. Our cost to maintain and develop League has also been pretty stable over time, too. Ensuring we have an equally stable income coming in to reinvest in the game, however, has been, frankly, a more recent challenge.”
Meddler followed up by explaining why they initially added Hextech Chests, wanting to offer rewards to dedicated players. This wound up providing a “great player experience” that ultimately wasn’t sustainable by his account.
Both devs explained that, while they want to preserve this great player experience, they had to give away fewer skins. The process of trying to preserve Hextech Chests is a large part of why premium skins were introduced at exorbitant prices along with gacha systems.
However, they ultimately decided that removing these chests was necessary.
“This is about ensuring the sustainable, long-term health of League. We do hope this is helpful context for those of you who have been wondering what our thinking was with this change. We want to ensure League remains a great, fully free-to-play game. We believe a change like this, while unpopular, is the right call,” claimed Meddler.
Players have already pushed back on this explanation. Their aim was surely to help players see where they’re coming from to quell some of the unrest that arose from Hextech Chests being removed, but it’s had the opposite effect.
“Their excuse for chests is so bullsh*t. Don’t gut free rewards and then make paid products more expensive, pick one or the other,” said one Redditor.
The fact that these Hextech Chests have been removed without scaling back how much super premium skins cost is a big pain point, especially when Riot was charging almost $500 for Faker’s Ahri skin.
Riot Games“Guys we needed to add exalted and gacha skins and remove chests to sustain league long term, we’re not greedy guys please,” said another player.
It is, however, worth mentioning that the devs are working on making the Battle Pass even better value now than it was before, making missions a bit easier to grind through and removing unpopular mission types to make XP easier to earn.
The current Battle Pass system already offers much more bang for your buck than the previous one that existed before Season 2025, so the update isn’t all bad.
However, don’t expect those Hextech Chest memes to disappear any time soon. Especially considering that, if the devs had addressed the removal of these chests before the Season 2025 patch rather than players discovering it themselves, their explanation likely would have gone over better.