Riot is giving less popular League of Legends champions new skins in 2020

Riot Games revealed a few new details about the skins players can expect in 2020. The news comes from a video hosted by Jonathan “Bellissimoh” Belliss, the product lead of personalization on the League development team at Riot, as part of the developer’s on-going celebration for League of Legends season 2020.

Belliss starts out by giving fans an idea of just how many skins League has gotten in the last couple of years. He says that Riot released about 80 skins in 2018, and in 2019 it crossed the 100 skin mark. Looking ahead to 2020, Riot is aiming for over 120. He acknowledges that for the most part skins are always going to go to the game’s most popular champions — after all the more people play a champion, the bigger the potential audience for a skin is.

But, Belliss explains, part of the reason the skin goal is so high this year is because Riot wants to give some love to champions who have gone years without a new skin. In the future, Belliss says, Riot is hoping “champion mains can count the time since they last got a skin in months instead of years.”

That doesn’t mean the popular champions will get ignored. Belliss says that champions like Ezreal, Lux, Ahri, and Kai’Sa will probably get skins as well. He says that skins for those champions can reach a massive number of players, and they help fund Riot’s ability to make skins for champions with smaller but still dedicated fan bases.

In 2020, Riot is also looking to reevaluate the thematic skin lines that its had in the past. While skin lines like the Project skins, or the Star Guardian skins have been popular around the world, some aren’t so lucky. To help the less popular skins find their place in the game, Riot is going to take a look at themes like Snowdown, in order to figure out why they’re less popular and what can be improved.

When Belliss finishes talking about the upcoming skins for 2020, he also mentions that Riot is looking to make events more unique and less of a time commitment in the coming year, as well as adding a new game mode for each event, so they bring a new gameplay experience to the table.

Here’s the very very long list of champions that are supposed to get skins sometime this year:

• Skarner
• Xerath
• Mordekaiser
• Kindred
• Rek’Sai
• Vel’Koz
• Karthus
• Sion
• Twitch
• Taric
• Pantheon
• Nautilus
• Trundle
• Bard
• Ornn
• Taliyah