⭐ Team Voice Chat Comes To League! 🎙️
We've got some initial information regarding team (important caveat) voice chat coming to League. We don't have an official date right now, but we do know it will requite Honor Level 3+ and no active voice restrictions.
Of course (as expected) conversations will be recorded and may be reviewed to determine bans/punishments.
How will it work?
This feature is entirely optional - and will be push to talk ONLY.
Recent PBE mining has also revealed that Riot has integrated Voicemod technology! This is a really interesting collaboration - and a great business move. Voice transformation sounds simple, but a good system is extremely hard to make. You need low latency, acceptable GPU usage, noise handling, microphone compatibility etc. etc. This is Voicemod's entire company! They already have the tech that Riot needs, and it would be a waste of time for them to spend a few years (and millions of dollars) developing their own.
The more interesting play here is the idea of "voice skins" that was revealed in the data mining today. If that makes it to prod, then Riot just made an entirely new cosmetic category 😔. Imagine a normal voice, privacy/anonymization filters for free, and then...
- PROJECT voice
- Arcane voice
- Star Guardian voice
- Demon voice
- Robot voice
The list would go on and on. This Voicemod partnership goes way beyond "Riot just wants a voice changer" IMO, and heads into monetization territory. Voicemod is getting such an incredible B2B deal here 😂 - integrating with one of the biggest IPs on the planet is insane social proof for the future of their business. They could essentially become "the voice SDK for games".
Well, it seems Meddler on Reddit has confirmed my suspicion 😂
Besides the obvious flaming potential, there are good parts of this as well. There is absolutely a general strategic advantage to be gained from having voice chat native in League. With League being an extremely complex and ever shifting game, voice chat would allow players to provide context about their strategy instantaneously - without having to type "WATCH OUT BOT" or spam pinging which everyone loves to ignore. It would also allow the new player experience to improve, since as people get into better lobbies - the new player can absorb contextual information from their teammates and learn faster.
Also, the planned filters will help women, younger players, people with distinct accents, and anyone self-conscious about their voice to communicate like everyone else.
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