Riot Games is making all League of Legends replays private

Riot Games has announced that from League of Legends Patch 26.20, in-game replays will be made private and only able to be viewed by those who actually took part in the game.

The change, announced on Oct. 6, will deliver a huge blow to a cottage industry of clippers and content creators who used pro and semi-pro play as a source of content, effectively ending dozens of careers.

While initially the thought was this hostile move against content creators by Riot Games it seems more likely now that the measure has been taken to prevent bad actors from creating bots who use replay data to learn the game.

AI ruins everything? Riot Games is privating replays to prevent LoL bots from running amok

As mentioned the replay change will mean that replays will only be accessible to players who were in the match. For many content creators, especially those focused on tracking pro players and their high-level solo queue games, this decision is effectively a death sentence. While many players and content creators do upload clips of their play, for most, their gameplay is usually limited to only their own streams, and clippers of those streams.

But rather than a targeted attack on content creators, the post on the patch notes, as well as additional documentation seems to give away the reasoning.

As theorized by League of Legends lore content creator Necrit, the aim seems to be to prevent access from third parties who are scraping the replays for gameplay details, and then training AI bots to play LoL or create LoL-based derivatives.

This theory is backed up by the linked post “Game Memory Access Removed for Third Party Apps” which was posted in late September, and gave a preview of what was to come in patch 26.20. Riot explicitly blamed AI for these issues within that post:

“We want Riot’s games to last lifetimes, and while we know this will not be a popular decision by any stretch of the imagination, bringing our client security up to industry standard is the only chance we have to defend against the overwhelming abuse and instrumentation of our games by current AI models.”

While this change won’t affect legitimate users of Riot’s API (stats people, etc.) it will likely cut down on the number of AI creators abusing the system. Think about all the AI-generated game x game content we’ve seen recently (Tony Hawk x Modern Warfare, Skyrim in Fortnite, etc.). Riot seems keen to avoid “League x insert random game” becoming the next stage in this trend, and avoid AI-powered bots flooding servers.

What will happen to replay content creators remains to be seen, but one thing's for sure: Gen AI scraping everything is clearly causing some concern from developers and they’re striking back to prevent potential theft.