Riot Games push for gender parity in LoL champion roster

League of Legends’ Lead Champion Producer Ryan “Reav3” Mireles recently revealed on Reddit that Riot Games is working to achieve a 50/50 split between male and female characters available to play in the popular MOBA.

Including the yet-to-be-released champion Bel’Veth, there are 98 male champions and 32 female champions in League of Legends, making for a 61.25%/38.75% split in favor of male champions. Reav3 stated that the company’s goal was to move the roster split closer to 50/50.

Riot aims for 50/50 gender split in League

In the comments on a reveal of a new League of Legends lore story, a comment by senior Riot employee Reav3 led to an impromptu AMA about gender representation in League of Legends. Reav3 explained the company’s current thinking about champion gender after one Redditor asked “why does it feel like female champions get so much more love than your male ones?”

“So a couple years ago we looked at the overall diversity of our roster, and one of the things it showed was that we had like 60% male champs and 40% female champs, or something close to that. We feel long-term it’s probably better to have something like 50/50 male and female champs, so we have been adding a bit more female champs then male champs on average, for the last few year. This is something we will likely continue until we are closer to 50/50 on the roster.”

Including the unreleased Bel’Veth, the last four champions added to League of Legends have been women. The most recent was Renata Glasc, who was added in February 2022. However, despite this focus on releasing more female champions, the gender split still sees male champions dominating over 60% of the roster. Even though the split has been 4 male champions and 9 female champions since the start of 2020, female champions still comprise less than 40% of the roster.

However, there is an additional question being posed by fans — does a 50/50 gender split really equal gender parity? While Riot have decidedly moved away from overtly sexualized female characters in recent releases, many fans point to the lack of updates for the older, more sexualized female characters.

One Redditor, who plays collegiate League of Legends at the University of North Florida, recently posted a 12,000-word essay exploring the sexualized portrayal of their favorite character, Shyvana. Shyvana is one of the oldest characters in League of Legends, having been released in 2011.

There is a distinct dichotomy between Riot’s latest releases of female characters and the untouched reminders of the company’s more fan service-centric past. An example of this is the ‘Prestige Arcade Skin’ for the character Caitlyn, which went viral in a post on Tumblr when an artist tried to improve the splash art’s anatomy.

So while Riot pushes for gender parity in the roster of its flagship game, it appears that the goal is still some way off.

Header: Riot Games