Riot Games’ League of Legends, Valorant, Teamfight Tactics, and Legends of Runeterra are now available to download from the Epic Games Store, the two companies announced Thursday. They’re free to download and play, just like they are from Riot. When you get them from the Epic Games Store, your computer will install the Riot Client, Riot’s new unified launcher, which is where you can actually install and launch the individual games.
This isn’t the first time Epic has offered a way to get another company’s launcher; you’ve been able to download the Itch.io launcher from the Epic Games Store since April. Epic’s willingness to include apps with other launchers is in line with CEO Tim Sweeney’s long-standing support for more open app distribution models. It’s something Sweeney directly emailed Apple CEO Tim Cook to advocate for on iOS, and Epic is also locked in legal battles with Apple and Google after it added a direct payment system to Fortnite in violation of the two companies’ rules.
Adding Riot titles brings games in the hugely popular League of Legends franchise to the Epic Games Store, and they could see an added boost by being available on Epic’s platform. But I’m not kidding when I say the League franchise is already huge: Riot shared this week that 180 million players played games set in the League of Legends universe just in October.
That number isn’t exactly what it seems, as Riot is including the mobile hit League of Legends: Wild Rift and counting a single person who plays two of its games as two separate players, according to PC Gamer. It’s still a gigantic number of players, though, and Riot is making a big push to grow that number even more.
Epic and Riot teamed up on a Fortnite skin for the League of Legends character Jinx, which will be available from the game’s item shop on Thursday. And the Fortnite skin and the Riot titles on the Epic Games Store arrive ahead of Arcane, the League of Legends TV show premiering November 6th on Netflix.
