Garena is a digital services company that engages in gaming, eSports, eCommerce and digital finance, primarily focusing on the Southeast Asian area. It was founded in Singapore in 2009, by current Chairman and Group CEO, Forrest Li. The parent company of Garena is Sea Limited, which also formerly called Garena.[1]
Garena handled League of Legends publishing for Southeast Asia from 2010–2022.[2]
Riot Games announced that their partnership with Garena would come to an end in 2022. Players were asked to migrate their account as soon as possible to ensure that the transition would go smoothly[3]. As of January 6th, 2023, the Garena SEA servers have been officially shut down and the new Riot SEA servers are now live. Account migration, however, will still continue for a while even after the Garena servers' closure[4].
Garena Platform (formerly Garena+) acted as the launcher to login, install, download/update, and open the League of Legends client, which could not be launched independently. Patch releases were a bit delayed compared to other Riot servers.
Lucky Crate was a Garena-exclusive system which included various rewards such as Orange Essence, Blue Essence, Key Fragments, Hextech Chests, Masterwork Chests, Champion permanents, and/or summoner icons. By default, there were 5 Lucky Creates: Champion Top, Champion Jungle, Champion Mid, Champion Bot, and Champion Support. One crate would cost 250.
Other types of Lucky Crates could appear during events.
The region had different skin tier price per server due to the differences in average income per region. The available methods to get certain cosmetics also differed. Token cost for event items higher than Riot servers. Some cosmetic items available in Riot servers were locked behind events and paywall while some exclusive contents could be obtained. For instance, prestige skins were removed from Hextech Crafting in most Garena servers.
Apart from the Vietnam and Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau servers, each server followed the same skin rarity tier guideline of Riot Games with consistent pricing. In Vietnam server, skin price and skin tier were chosen based on the popularity of the champion and the skin line. In the Taiwanese server, prestige points were removed from Hextech crafting, and Prestige point skins could only be obtained through lottery events. In addition, Garena servers also had their own loot systems separated from Hextech Crafting. There were regular discount events instead of weekly skin sales.
Garena Shell was the currency used to purchase RP.
Rampage (2012-2017): an annual 2-day League of Legends event held in the Philippines. It featured different e-sport events such as Celebrity Showmatch, a 5v5 game between various local celebrities in the country, and champion cosplaying. The event ticket was categorized into 3 different classes: Basic, Premium, and Deluxe. Each class had its own exclusive giveaways (skins, jackets, t-shirts, etc.) and perks.
Globe Conquerors Manila (2018-2019): the successor of Rampage. It established new events including, but not limited to, Cosplay Clash, Runeterra Art Event, Teamfight Tactics showdown, and SEA Invitational. Globe Conquerors Manila was put on hiatus due to the corona virus pandemic.
In January 2020, Garena Philippines dropped the price of Volcanic Wukong from 975 to 1 until January 31, 2020. This was meant to raise awareness for the concerning activity of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines, which began to spew ash and lava fountains earlier that month.[8]
On July 9, 2018 2:16 PM GMT+8, there was an unauthorized modification of the League of Legends PH client lobby where a certain javascript code was inserted. This code performs blockchain mining on affected computers, which consumes CPU resources from these computers. Local players noticed that their client consumes a very high amount of CPU usage and slowdowns on their computers. League of Legends - Philippines Facebook page issued a statement here[9]
250.
Other types of Lucky Crates could appear during events.
