Riot pauses under-18 accounts in Brazil as the ECA Digital takes effect

From Wednesday, March 18, 2026, Brazilian players under 18 will no longer be able to log in to League of Legends. Riot Games said so on March 10, in a notice on its Brazilian news pages: the publisher is temporarily raising the age rating of five of its games to 18 in the country, and adults who want to keep playing them are asked to prove their age.

The reason is a law. Brazil's Digital Statute of Children and Adolescents, known as the ECA Digital, takes effect on Tuesday, March 17, 2026, and its requirements on age verification and parental control apply to Riot from that day. The notice sets out a three-day calendar, lists the games, and makes one exception, for Valorant.

Riot presents the change as temporary. It writes that it will keep reviewing the five games under the law and expects them to return to their original age ratings by early 2027.

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

Three dates in one week

The notice orders the week around the day the law starts to apply. The day before, adults are asked to identify themselves; the day after, the doors close for minors.

The five games are League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, League of Legends: Wild Rift, 2XKO and Legends of Runeterra.

An adult can verify their age in one of four ways, according to the notice: a CPF number, which is the Brazilian taxpayer identification number; a debit or credit card; a scan of an identity document; or a facial scan that estimates age. The check is run through Kids Web Services, which Riot describes in the notice's questions and answers as an external, third-party service it uses for the process.

What happens to an under-18 account

For the five reclassified games, the notice is short: a player under 18 has their account paused and blocked from playing. Riot adds that an account blocked on or after March 18 is only paused and remains secure, and that everything in it will be there when the player regains access. Access comes back, with a parent's approval, once the games are rated again, which Riot targets for early 2027.

The notice does not go further than that. It says nothing about purchases already made or about refunds, and it does not address players under 12.

Riot presents parental control as part of the same update as age verification. The portal through which a parent consents for Valorant is the one tool the notice describes.

What the law requires

The ECA Digital is Law 15,211, signed on September 17, 2025. Its text, published by the Presidency of Brazil, applies to any information technology product or service aimed at children or adolescents in the country, or likely to be accessed by them, wherever it is developed or operated. Online games are covered by that definition.

Three parts of the text bear directly on what Riot announced.

The first is age verification. Article 9 obliges providers of content, products or services that are improper or prohibited for under-18s to take effective measures to keep minors out. Its first paragraph requires reliable age verification at each access and rules out self-declaration: ticking a box or typing a date of birth is no longer enough. That is the mechanism behind the checks that start for adults on March 16.

The second is parental supervision. Articles 17 and 18 require providers to offer tools that are easy to find and use, with default settings at the highest level of protection. Parents must be able to manage the account and its privacy options, restrict purchases and financial transactions, see consolidated figures for time spent, and identify the adult profiles a child communicates with. Article 21 adds a rule specific to games with text, voice or video chat: interaction between users is limited by default, so that it depends on a parent's consent.

The third is the loot box, a paid pack whose content the buyer does not know in advance. Article 2 of the law defines it as a feature of certain electronic games that lets the player acquire, for payment, consumable virtual items or random advantages without prior knowledge of their content or any guarantee that they will be useful. Article 20 prohibits 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.

Riot's notice does not mention loot boxes, and it gives no reason for raising the rating of these five games in particular. The connection is made by others. Teletime, a Brazilian trade publication, summed up the obligation on February 26 as a choice for games that contain loot boxes: block minors, or offer a version without the feature. Sheep Esports, which reported Riot's decision on March 13, wrote that the law 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.

The penalties and who applies them

A publisher that does not comply faces a scale of four sanctions, set out in Article 35 of the law.

Where no revenue figure exists, the fine is counted another way: between R$10 and R$1,000 per registered user of the provider, capped at R$50 million per violation. The text asks whoever sets a sanction to weigh the seriousness of the breach, whether it is a repeat, and the company's economic capacity. For a foreign company, the Brazilian branch or subsidiary is jointly liable for the fine.

The law itself does not name the authority. It refers to an autonomous administrative authority for the protection of the rights of children and adolescents in the digital environment, which oversees compliance across the country and may issue further rules. A decree signed the same day as the law, Decree 12,622 of September 17, 2025, gave that role to the ANPD, Brazil's data protection authority. The decree also organizes how a suspension or a prohibition is carried out when the company does not do it itself: through blocking orders sent to telecommunications providers and other connection services.

How March 17 became the date

The starting date was fixed less than three weeks before it arrived. The law's final article, as it now reads, states that the text enters into force on March 17, 2026. That wording was inserted by Law 15,352 of 2026; an earlier version, brought in by a provisional measure in 2025, had set the start at six months after publication.

Law 15,352 is dated Wednesday, February 25, 2026, and was published that day in an extra edition of the official gazette, according to its text on the Presidency's pages; Teletime reported the signing the next day. The law converts a provisional measure of 2025. It turns the ANPD into a regulatory agency, the National Data Protection Agency, attached to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, and creates a career of data protection specialists with 200 positions, entered by public examination.

When it wrote, Teletime added, a decree setting out the detail of the ECA Digital was still being drafted by the Ministry of Justice with four other parts of the federal government. Riot's notice, published 12 days later, makes the same point from the publisher's side: it describes the 18 rating as temporary and says it will keep examining its games under the law.

What it means for Brazil's competitive scene

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

The question was raised by the press and by players. Sheep Esports wrote on March 13 that for Brazilians under 18 the affected games become something to watch and not to play: a teenager can still follow the CBLOL but cannot open the game it is played on. The outlet noted that Brazil has one of the most committed League of Legends audiences in the world, with hundreds of thousands of viewers for the league each split, a split being one of the season's separate competitions.

Its main concern is the path to professional play. Professional rosters in League of Legends, the outlet wrote, are filled with players who built their skills from childhood, and cutting off under-18 players in Brazil cuts the supply of future players for the league. That is the outlet's analysis: neither Riot nor the league has published a number of affected accounts.

One professional has spoken publicly. Tatu, the jungler of FURIA, whose team won the first Americas Cup against Cloud9, voiced his frustration online, Sheep Esports reported. He suggested that only loot box content, and not whole games, should be closed to younger players. The jungler is the player who moves between the lanes of the map instead of holding one.

What comes next

Riot has given itself until early 2027 to bring the five games back to their original ratings, without saying what has to change in them first. Until then, its notice leaves an under-18 player of those games with a paused account and no date of return other than that one.

On the government's side, two pieces were still open at the end of February, by Teletime's account: the decree that details the law was in preparation, and the 200 specialist positions created for the renamed agency were to be filled by public examination. The agency may also issue supplementary rules of its own, a power the law gives it in Article 34, with the instruction to weigh the nature, the risk and the business model of each service.

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