Riot Games has announced that the original skins of the 60 champions in League of Legends Classic, a reworked version of League of Legends that is set to launch this month on July 29, will be available for free at launch, after the community derided the company for forcing them to pay for “classic” skins in the upcoming mode.
While the full release of League of Legends Classic is still over a week away, the public beta for the game has been available since July 14. The new mode intends to bring things back to basics for League of Legends fans, meaning only the original 60 champions will be available to play in all their pre-2013, unpatched glory.
However, as spotted by PC Gamer, fans were not pleased with Riot Games’ attempts to monetize the mode during its public beta. That’s because the default skins you unlocked as standard were not the original skins the 60 champions launched with, and players were instead saddled with said champions’ modern, 2026-era costumes.
Hey everyone. Thank you for your feedback on League Classic. We have a small update we wanted to share on:
👗Classic skins
💰Gameplay
🔧Champion kits pic.twitter.com/CkoW1EJHZj— League of Legends (@LeagueOfLegends) July 17, 2026
That being said, the original, classic skins were available—you just would have had to pay for them. As Eurogamer noted, not including the four classic skins that were available for free, the other 56 classic skins could be acquired in one of two ways: either by grinding the battle pass, or by spending 500 Riot Points (roughly equivalent to $5). That means that even if you purchased the Riot Points in bulk, you’d still be paying upwards of $250 just to unlock them all.
After the community complained on the r/leagueoflegends subreddit that locking “so many basic nostalgic elements” behind a paywall was both “greedy” and “shatters any sense of nostalgia,” Riot Games’ R&D Director Brian ‘FeralPony’ Feeney stepped in to assert that the team would be “taking a look at a number of things to address around some of the biggest areas of feedback.”
This wasn’t just empty corpospeak, either, as on July 17, Riot Games released a video on its official X account confirming that all of the original 60 skins in League of Legends Classic had been made available to use for free. Between this and EA removing the microtransactions in College Football 27 earlier this month, it’s starting to feel like hell is about to freeze over.