Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, has reportedly issued a cease-and-desist letter to the people behind Chronoshift, a fan-run server that allowed players to run a 10-year-old version of the game. The company has also denied claims of extortion in asking for the Chronoshift code and website, though it did acknowledge an informal exchange between the parties that went sour.
The Chronoshift project was in development for five years and made without any compensation. But spinning off a company's work in a way that replicates a core product is often a violation of legal terms, and indeed, Riot warned against continuing Chronoshift when the project was formally revealed in 2020. Nintendo has infamously shut down many such fan efforts, from a Pokémon MMO to Metroid 2 remakes, seeing them as cutting into its business or at least a violation of of its intellectual property. League of Legends is an extremely profitable franchise that's led to several spinoff games and media.
The cease-and-desist letter was published by PC Gamer, which obtained confirmation that before it was sent, a member of Riot's security team reached out to the Chronoshift crew via Discord and asked not just for the website and source code, but "identifiable information" they shared between each other. "Give me what I'm looking for and we won't sue. Refuse and we will," the person said, threatening to hand the matter off to legal counsel. The conversation appears to have ended shortly after a counteroffer was made to simply shut down the project. A Riot representative said that the company is "disappointed with the tenor of the conversation" and will be "addressing this internally." At the same time, its cease-and-desist letter does call for the Chronoshift team to hand over all related software, including not just source code but things like modified game clients. It also asks for the server and project to be shut down, and all related content to be pulled from social media channels.
Riot is presumably worried about Chronoshift becoming a more popular alternative to the mainstream version of League of Legends, but this is denied in a message on the the project's website. "We are incredibly disappointed by the way Riot chose to handle this situation," the message adds. "Instead of opening a conversation about the future and interest in this kind of project, they attempted what could be seen as an attempt to take advantage of our work for free and start taking legal action against us."
The idea that Riot was attempting extortion could be based on speculation about it wanting the code to launch its own retro servers, much in the same way that Blizzard is now running World of Warcraft Classic. But it's doubtful that the company would need third-party resources to make that happen, so the more likely explanation is that it wants to preserve League of Legends property and reserve the right to launch retro servers if it so chooses.
Source: PC Gamer