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Last week, League of Legends shadow-dropped The Demon's Hand, an in-universe twist on poker-roguelike phenomenon Balatro. Interwoven with a few touches of narrative that build on the tentative threads spun out from Arcane season 2, The Demon's Hand is a very good homage. But it's also indicative of the broader problem that Riot faces as its flagship game continues to age out of its heyday.
If you've played Balatro, The Demon's Hand will be instantly familiar. A standard deck of cards is adapted very slightly ('Command' cards replace Face cards; Sun, Moon, and Stars replace traditional suits), but different hands still add up in an attempt to beat various high scores. Riot's effort adds a more combative approach, turning 'blinds' into HP and allowing your opponents to hit back, blending Balatro's score attack gameplay with Slay the Spire's turn-based approach.
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The Demon's Hand represents a substantial amount of work. Operating in-client, getting it working within Riot's aging infrastructure has clearly been a significant undertaking. Unique assets and animations have clearly taken plenty of time and effort to create. The ability to unpick and reinvent Balatro as effectively as this is impressive work in itself. And yet in a little over a month, The Demon's Hand will be wiped from the client, and we'll probably never see it again.
Riot's got form with this kind of thing. Over the years, myriad mini-games have appeared and then disappeared from League of Legends. Some of those were more direct twists on the game itself, such as battles against comically-difficult AI. But more recently there was Swarm, a bright and colorful twist on Vampire Survivors, starring one of LoL's various anime girl team-up squads as its cast. Swarm was great, particularly as a distraction if you wanted to play League of Legends but needed to recover from just having played League of Legends.
However, after serving its purpose – primarily as an advert for Riot's latest batch of anime girl skins – Swarm was disabled. And now, less than a year later, a timer sits above The Demon's Hand, telling me that it'll be gone in about 35 days' time.
The problem is this: League of Legends players want these alternative experiences, but Riot can't afford to let them have them. A player locked into Swarm, or The Demon's Hand, is a player not filling out the game's traditional competitive queues. That harms the health of the game generally, but more importantly it harms Riot's bottom line – a player not queuing up for a 'real' game is a player who doesn't need to buy the cosmetics that are the studio's bread and butter.
Riot's recent extremely public monetization controversy proved just how important those skins really are. The Demon's Hand exacerbates the issue by only letting you progress to its hardest difficulties by earning rare Sigils (the game's answer to Balatro's game-augmenting Jokers). Those Sigils can only be earned by playing League of Legends, feeding you back into the ecosystem if you dare to step outside it for too long, only for the whole thing to shut down in a month regardless of how much you earn.
The Demon's Hand and Swarm are only two symptoms of a broader problem. Alternate game modes have never been allowed to hang around for too long because of their impact on player counts, but it goes further. Riot has long since struggled to know what to do with games that it can't monetize in the long term, as the untimely death of indie publishing label Riot Forge proves. Valorant and Teamfight Tactics still live because they could immediately be money-makers that continued to swell Riot's bottom line even if they did take League players out of the queue. Even as Riot says it wants to invest in these smaller experiences, their limited life-spans means that no matter how good they might be, the knowledge of their eventual absence leaves a pretty sour taste.
