The real reason behind Eternals

Riot has been losing players since season 8 because of the catastrophic changes they made past season.

Their revenues went from 2.1 to 1.4 billion $. People left LoL for other games. Why ? because lol lost its charm and attractivity.

Riot wants to continue to invest on E-Sports which many people in the stock exchange have been saying it's not a good and long term investment. Moreover Riot actually loses money on investing on E-sports. Advertising revenues will not be enough to compensate for the player loss.

Tencent wants Riot to keep a certain amount of benefits however with the player loss, E-sports and Skin selling aren't enough...

Instead of trying to improve their game and trying to get back its old players Riot invents new ways to get benefits Eternals is an example.

They decided to remove all game modes which took them a lot of ressources to compensate the player losses. The next new game modes which will appear will only exist if they can be subject of strong practices of monetization.

Riot is destroying itself because it wants to keep a vision of an elitist game made for pros and balanced around pros for E-sports which is just an illusion. In the past people believed E-sports would be a new and efficient way to make tons of money. However Riot was the first company to test E-sports on a big scale and it is actually not worth it. It was a dangerous gamble which wasn't really successful. If it was successfull many companies would make it like Riot. However they just use e-sports to promote the game and after a while they give up on the practice and stop to invest into it, because they know that after a game reaches their player number peak its useless and it's gonna become a way to lose money.

For Riot, it only allowed them to promote the game and to get new players however after the game was fully promoted around the world this practice became useless. Riot has already reached its player number peak and it has been decreasing the last years. However Riot keeps to bet on E-sports while their strategy should focus on how to keep their playerbase on the long term.

Which means focusing on the 90% of the players and stopping to balance things around pros and E-sports.

Instead of focusing on the vast majority of players they prefer focusing on their elite pro community. Instead of focusing on the game's attractivity, they prefer flashy and quick games and plays for E-sports. Instead of taking player's feedback they are taking viewer's feedback.

Yes Riot is losing players, money and attractivity and they try to compensate by milking its playerbase with addiction issues...

I'll add to this that riot is actually developping a mobile version of LoL :

https://kotaku.com/riot-games-to-make-mobile-version-of-league-of-legends-1834951496

They refused last year and had a clash with tencent about it however because of the player loss they were forced to accept to do a mobile version of the game...

So yes that alone just proves that Riot Games is in a desesperate situation. They were forced to accept to develop a game which they refused to make.