Under 18 in Brazil: how Riot's age checks work for League of Legends

For a Brazilian League of Legends player, the login screen changed in March 2026. Adults are asked to prove their age before they play, and players under 18 find their account paused. The questions it raises are practical: which games are concerned, what proof Riot Games accepts, what becomes of a paused account and its contents, why Valorant is treated differently, and when the old ratings return.

This guide answers them from Riot's own notice to Brazilian players, dated March 10, 2026, and from the texts that sit behind it: Brazil's Digital Statute of Children and Adolescents, known as the ECA Digital, and the decree that regulates it. It covers the publisher's procedure, not the law as a whole, and it describes the situation as it stands in mid-August 2026.

The notice is short, and part of the work is to be precise about what it says and what it leaves out. Where Riot has published nothing, this guide says so and goes no further.

Riot Games, notice of March 10, 2026 on its Brazilian news pages.

Five games rated 18, one exception

Riot's notice, published on its Brazilian news pages, announced that the publisher was temporarily raising the age rating of five games to 18 in Brazil. The aim, it said, was to comply with the requirements of the ECA Digital on age verification and parental control, which took effect on Tuesday, March 17, 2026.

League of Legends heads the list. Valorant is the only Riot game the notice treats differently: it is not among the reclassified games, and players aged 12 to 17 can still play it if a parent or legal guardian agrees. The notice adds that Riot will keep evaluating the five games and their features against the law's requirements.

The notice describes the change as temporary, and it applies to Brazil only. It says nothing about other countries.

The calendar of March 2026

The notice set out three dates in one week, organized around the day the law began to apply.

From the day of publication, March 10, some players could already see a request to verify their age when they logged in to their Riot account. Verification became compulsory for players aged 18 and over on Monday, March 16. The law took effect on Tuesday, March 17. From Wednesday, March 18, players under 18 could no longer access the five reclassified games.

The request appears when a player logs in to the Riot account itself. The order of the dates put the adult checks before the law applied and the closure for minors the day after.

How an adult proves their age

Riot presents the check as a way to confirm that a player meets the minimum age requirement for its games. The notice lists four methods, and the player chooses one:

1. a CPF number, the Brazilian taxpayer identification number;
2. a payment card, debit or credit;
3. a scan of an identity document;
4. a facial scan that estimates age.

The check is not run by Riot itself. In the questions and answers at the foot of the notice, Riot names Kids Web Services and describes it as an external, third-party service it uses for the age verification process. It does not say what data the service keeps, for how long, or what Riot receives in return beyond the result.

The law and its decree fill part of that gap, because they set rules for any age check of this kind. Article 9 of Law 15,211, the ECA Digital, requires reliable age verification at each access to content that is improper or prohibited for under-18s, and rules out self-declaration: typing a date of birth is not enough. Article 13 of the law says data collected to check an age may be used for that purpose only.

Two of Riot's four methods involve an image: the document scan and the facial scan. For the first, Decree 12,880 of March 18, 2026, which regulates the law, requires the image or copy of an identity document to be deleted immediately and irreversibly once the needed information is captured. For every method, it bars the use of age data to build a behavioral profile and requires a way for the user to contest the age found.

Whether a given method meets the reliability the law demands is a question for the ANPD, the national data protection authority: on May 22, 2026 it opened a call for input on a guide to age assurance mechanisms, with a deadline of July 9, covering among other points the specific requirements for facial estimation and document checks.

What happens to an under-18 account

For the five reclassified games, the notice gives a short answer. A player under 18 has their account paused and blocked from playing. The pause applies to every player under 18, with no distinction between a 17-year-old and a younger player; only the Valorant route draws a line inside that group, at 12.

Riot adds two reassurances. An account blocked on or after March 18, 2026 is only paused and remains secure, and everything in it will be there when the player regains access. Access returns, with a parent's approval, once the games are rated again, which Riot targets for early 2027.

So a paused account is not a closed one: in Riot's words, the account and its contents are kept, and the notice says nothing of deletion or reset.

The decree that regulates the law has a related provision. For the products and services it lists as prohibited for children and adolescents, loot boxes among them, it tells providers to prevent under-18s from creating accounts and to identify and remove accounts they operate. A pause blocks the account without erasing it. Riot does not cite that provision, and the notice does not link its decision to any article of the decree, which was published eight days after the notice.

Valorant and the parent's consent

Valorant follows another path. The notice describes it in three steps.

The age band follows Brazilian law. The original Statute of the Child and Adolescent, Law 8,069 of July 13, 1990, defines a child as a person under twelve and an adolescent as a person between twelve and eighteen. Riot's consent route is open to adolescents. The notice does not describe any route for children under 12.

The portal also answers a duty of its own. Articles 17 and 18 of the ECA Digital require providers to offer parental supervision tools with default settings at the highest level of protection, and the law's Article 21 limits interaction between users by default in games with chat, so that it depends on a parent's consent. Riot's notice names the portal only as the place where consent is given: it does not list its other functions, or say how chat works in Valorant for a player aged 12 to 17.

A second check at the store

Riot's check is not the only one a Brazilian player may meet. Under Article 12 of the law and the decree that details it, app stores and operating systems must also ask for an age when an account is created, verify it, obtain a guardian's approval before a minor installs an app, and pass apps a free age signal with no exact date of birth. The law adds that a guardian's silence is never to be taken as consent to a download.

That signal does not replace Riot's own check: the decree states that receiving it does not relieve a provider of its responsibility, and when a provider's check and the signal disagree, the provider applies the more protective result. For a player, a store account and a Riot account may each ask for proof of age.

Why an 18 rating

Riot's notice gives no reason for rating these five games 18 while keeping Valorant open, and it does not mention loot boxes. The law gives the context.

The ECA Digital defines a loot box as a feature of certain electronic games that lets the player acquire, for payment, consumable virtual items or random advantages without knowing their content in advance. Article 20 bans loot boxes in electronic games aimed at children and adolescents, or likely to be accessed by them, in the terms of the game's age rating.

The decree then gives a publisher of a game with loot boxes three routes, in Article 23: verify the age of its users so that under-18s cannot reach the feature; offer a version without loot boxes; or restrict loot boxes by default for children and adolescents. The last two exempt the game from age verification.

Riot's notice, published eight days before the decree, went further than any of those routes for the five games. It closed the games themselves to under-18s, for now, and asked adults to verify. Sheep Esports, which reported the decision on March 13, wrote that the law mainly targets games with loot box and gacha systems, gacha being the name given to random draws paid for in a game, and recalled that League of Legends introduced its Hextech Chests in 2016. That is the outlet's reading; Riot has not published its own.

What the court asked of League of Legends

A second track opened in June, and it concerns League of Legends by name. On June 16, 2026, the Court of Justice of the Federal District and Territories announced that its 1st Children and Youth Court had ordered Riot Games Serviços, the Brazilian subsidiary of the Riot Games group, part of the Tencent conglomerate, to pay R$15 million in collective moral damages over the loot boxes sold in the game. The case was a civil public action brought by the child-rights association ANCED.

The court noted that the game carried a rating of 12 and up, and held that this significantly widened the exposure of younger and more vulnerable players to compulsive buying. The company's defense that nothing was unlawful before the ECA Digital took effect did not succeed: the judge held that the prohibition already followed from the Federal Constitution, the 1990 statute, the Consumer Protection Code and a 2014 resolution of the national council for children's rights. Among four measures to be put in place within 90 days of the judgment becoming final, it ordered an age check with a high degree of reliability that blocks minors from the boxes. The other three are a warning of their random nature on every screen that offers them, the exact probability of obtaining each item, and a free refund system for purchases made by minors without their parents' authorization. Failing to comply costs R$100,000 a day.

The judgment can be appealed, and none of its obligations runs before it is final. Until it is final, it adds no obligation: the age checks in force are the ones Riot announced in March.

Who enforces the rules

The procedure exists because the law carries sanctions. Article 35 of the ECA Digital runs from a warning to a fine of up to 10 percent of the economic group's revenue in Brazil, or R$10 to R$1,000 per registered user where no revenue figure exists, capped at R$50 million per violation, and on to the suspension or prohibition of activities, which only the courts can order. For a foreign company, its Brazilian branch or subsidiary is jointly liable for the fine.

Warnings and fines belong to the ANPD, which Decree 12,622 of September 17, 2025 designated as the law's autonomous authority. The authority itself changed shape this year. Law 15,352 of February 25, 2026, the same law that fixed March 17 as the day the ECA Digital took effect, created the Agência Nacional de Proteção de Dados as a special autarchy linked to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, with functional, technical, decision-making, administrative and financial autonomy. It also created 200 permanent posts of data protection regulation specialist, to be filled as the service requires.

The competitive scene

Riot's notice says nothing about esports. It does not mention the CBLOL, Brazil's League of Legends league, or any other competition, and it sets no rule on who may play in them.

The effect on the scene has been discussed by the press. Sheep Esports wrote on March 13 that for Brazilians under 18, the five games become something to watch and not to play: a teenager can still follow the CBLOL, which draws hundreds of thousands of viewers each split, a split being one of the season's separate competitions, but cannot open the game it is played on.

The outlet's main concern is the path to professional play. Professional players, it wrote, have usually built their skills since childhood, so cutting off Brazilian minors from League of Legends cuts the CBLOL's supply of future talent. That is the outlet's analysis. Neither Riot nor the league has published a number of affected accounts. Sheep Esports also reported that a FURIA professional criticized the change online and suggested restricting only the loot box content for younger players, rather than whole games.

What comes next

Riot's stated aim is to return all its games to their original age ratings by early 2027. The notice does not say what has to change in the games first.

Three other processes run alongside. The ANPD's guide to age assurance mechanisms, put to consultation from May 22 with a deadline of July 9, will set what a reliable verification means in practice, and the decree leaves the authority to decide the stages in which age assurance is rolled out. The Federal District judgment can still be appealed, and its 90-day period does not start until it is final. The Ministry of Justice is to set, by its own act, how age ratings are displayed in digital stores.

How each of these lands for a given account depends on the player's age, the game and the method used. Until early 2027, the rule Riot has published stands: adults verify, under-18s are paused in five games, and Valorant stays open from 12 with a parent's consent.

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