During Microsoft’s annual Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase this year, Marc Merrill, Co-founder and President of Riot Games, unveiled a huge announcement for their titles – they’re joining Xbox Game Pass!

Across all of Riot’s current titles, “and more”, Xbox Game Pass will be providing huge value for players this Winter, through primarily granting access to content that would normally be paid.

Free League of Legends Champions? Sign Me Up!

League of Legends is the big one here, with all 160 currently released champions becoming free to use if you have Xbox Game Pass. The MOBA has been difficult to get into in more recent years with the ever-growing roster of characters to play that are locked behind a length grind of “Blue Essence”, or busting out your wallet. When new champions come out, they do so at 975 “Riot Points”, the premium currency players can obtain through paid purchases or promotions like the current one run by Amazon Gaming. With 1380 Riot Points being $10 USD, this effectively makes a new Champion in the game cost around $7 USD. Of course, that’s not the full story, as older Champions are cheaper than that, and there are a couple of bundles available.

Not that this is a large problem for current players, as those that play the game should be able to earn new Champions as they come out with their saved up Blue Essence from regularly playing the game, in part due to a slower release cadence than in the earlier days of the game, but this becomes a huge pain point for newer players.

Unlocking everything for free though if you have an active Xbox Game Pass subscription, provides next-level value for anyone that has wanted to try the game. Now, if only the community wasn’t so toxic in-game.

That’s not the only game getting free stuff though from the Game Pass deal, like we said before, everything from Riot is getting love.

Everything First-Party Gets Game Pass Love

Everything that Riot creates in-house is going to be benefiting from Game Pass.

• Legends of Runeterra, their card game, will provide the entire base set of cards.
• Wild Rift, their mobile and soon console version of League of Legends, will provide their Champion roster.
• Valorant players will see all Agent characters available.
• Teamfight Tactics gets some “Little Legends” unlocked from the partnership.

These unlocks will also apply to players on mobile, which shows a deeper integration for Xbox to everywhere that people are playing games. We’ve certainly got nothing against that!

And More?

One of the more intriguing aspects about this is though is the “and more” portion of their promotional image. This could be a callout to the fact that Wild Rift will eventually be making its way to consoles, after Riot said we’d get no updates on that delay this year, or perhaps we’ll be seeing integration with new titles Riot has in the works, like Project L, their fighting game that we got to see a bit of last year during RiotX Arcane.

Though, that could also be the fact that “Players will also receive bonus experience across select titles” according to the official posting on Xbox Wire.

So, are you excited about Riot making its way over to Game Pass?

Riot Games is coming to Xbox Game Pass in Winter 2022.