If you’ve ever considered buying a League of Legends skin, you’ve probably jumped onto YouTube and checked out one of SkinSpotlights’ videos. Simple yet effective showcases of upcoming skins, the YouTuber is the reason that so many people pick up LoL cosmetics – or, alternatively, decide to save their cash. However, on January 11, they announced that they’ll be scaling back their output come patch 14.4.
With the all-new Dragonmancer skins hitting the Rift, and the upcoming Heavenscale and Foreseen Yasuo (or Yasuold) skins being showcased over the past few days, League of Legends has some slick new looks in the works. But, come patch 14.4, we may not be able to preview them quite so easily ahead of time, as one of the MOBA‘s biggest content creators, SkinSpotlights, announces that they are pulling back from LoL content.
SkinSpotlights primarily showcases upcoming League skins, both as they drop on the PBE, and when they eventually drop in-game. They describe their motivation as being at a “huge low,” calling themself “defeated.”
“Starting with 14.4 I’m going to be scaling back what I do and cover,” their January 11 tweet reads. “Coverage will be slow, scuffed and some style of videos will be impossible for me to produce going forward.
“Just really defeated, my December project was to spin up two new channels. Everything has been made for those and I started to get everything rolling but those are impacted and won’t be possible at all for me to continue. Short term I will be looking into making and getting some things into semi-functioning order but motivation is at a huge low right now. I need to sort out some stuff IRL before I can even start trying to get some of the workflow back to normal.”
They go on to clarify that they make around £50,000 each year from their YouTube content, and that “skin videos rpm are anywhere from as low as £0.20 up to at best £0.70 and varies hard.” They go on to compare that number to software engineering at Riot Games, which they claim is in “six figures.”
A follow-up tweet on January 12 reads “pretty much I’ve been told not to really talk about stuff and haven’t been given any guidelines on what I can so I’ve been vague.
“There are people at Riot who want to help, but then there’s people who act like ‘Riot Zed’ is the best way I can probably put it while being vague.”
Riot Zed, for reference, was a member of the company’s security team, who is formerly quoted as saying “I find people and things” when involved in a dispute over a now-defunct League of Legends fan project called Chronoshift.
“Like its nice to have direct lines rather than a middleman but some people should have that middleman,” SkinSpotlights concludes.
Following these comments, PCGamesN has reached out to Riot Games for a statement, and will update this piece if we hear more.
SkinSpotlights has, however, confirmed that they “still plan to do Wild Rift,” even if they leave League of Legends itself behind.