Riot Shutting Down League's Social Feature, Clubs, Will Partner With Discord

Riot Games is sunsetting Clubs, a social feature intended to facilitate communication between like-minded players in League of Legends. Originally implemented in 2016, Clubs have since been surpassed by other community tools, a fact that Riot readily admitted to in yesterday's blog post regarding the closure.

Riot made several comparisons between Clubs and Discord, saying that "we're never going to create a community tool that beats out the industry leaders." The choice, then, was to decide if the company would continue to try and invest in Clubs -- a feature that "was really exciting at the time" -- but would need to be totally rebuilt now. The reasoning is that it's better to focus on what Riot does best and build out its games rather than try and catch up to what other companies already do better.

The frequent mentions of Discord were no coincidence, either. Riot will be partnering with Discord to ensure a smooth transition with Clubs users who want to keep their communities together. The Clubs shut-off won't be for a few months yet, near the end of the year, so you'll have time to figure something else out if you don't want to rely on that.