The New Developer Portal (Beta)

Hi everyone!

We’re excited to give you a heads-up about the launch of something we’ve been working on for a little while now: the future of developer.riotgames.com!

We want to let you know what to expect in the coming weeks and months as we launch a fairly early beta of this new experience that will live alongside the existing Developer Portal, and focus at first on providing self-service requests for RSO Clients to supplement your Riot API applications. For those of you who are aware of the existing RSO Client setup experience, it’s a bit manual, labor intensive and invite-only. We’re excited to be moving towards a developer experience where RSO Clients will be accessible to all developers with a production API key. 

But that’s just our first step.

This new Developer Portal will be in beta and live side-by-side with the existing developer.riotgames.com while it adds functionality over time, and eventually becomes a fully-featured alternative to the legacy portal, at which point we’ll start a transition process for developers from old to new, and set a deprecation window, similar to when we roll out new versions of API’s.
 

Q: Why is Riot doing this?

A: The existing portal was finalized back in 2018, and as you may know, a lot has changed at Riot since then. We only had one game’s ecosystem to manage, and RSO wasn’t available for third parties to authenticate players at all. We’ve also accumulated a lot of cruft in our systems for managing API access and communicating with devs, and last year, we scoped out a series of solutions to tackle these problems that all merged into a rewrite of developer.riotgames.com.

Q:  Do I need to do anything?

A: Nope! Not yet, anyway. The first beta version of the developer portal will be a place for you to request new RSO Clients and review documentation specific to RSO. We will announce new features to the portal and any needed steps for developers to take as we ship updates over the coming months.

Q: What changes can I expect the developer portal to have by the time I’ll need to migrate?

A: Other than look, feel, and performance, the high level changes you’ll see will include:

• Replacing the current system of “apps” and “API keys” with RSO Clients. Apps and RSO Clients will become synonymous.

• The distinction between personal and production apps will be different. Apps will gain increased scopes by jumping through some procedural hoops up to a point, before needing manual review, but we will not have separate application processes for personal/production as we do now.

• Messaging will be overhauled and likely outsourced from the site itself. We know the current system is cumbersome; we’re looking into solutions that will be more seamless and consistent.

• Docs are getting an overhaul, including adding search, and allowing for some kind of community contributions (think pull requests).

• A searchable index of approved apps, so you’ll be able to cross-reference who has official dev support from us, and see their current standing and/or any known issues.

We’re super excited to be heading into the next phase of Riot’s developer support and enable talented developers to build the next great player destinations that are made better when players sign in with Riot.