LCS legend Doublelift announces permanent retirement amid 2024 roster uncertainty

Peter ‘Doublelift’ Peng has announced his retirement from League of Legends after over a decade since his debut.

Doublelift has been one of the few North American players who has been at the top of the LCS for almost his entire career. The ADC player started his career with CLG and bounced around between TSM and Team Liquid and will finish his time as a pro as a member of 100 Thieves.

Doublelift announced his retirement on December 1, 2023, in a 14-minute-long interview going over his decision and his career as a whole.

The player said that this time, his decision to hang up his keyboard and mouse is permanent as he has taken breaks from professional League of Legends and come back before.

“I’m retiring, for real this time,” he said in the video.

Doublelift announces permanent retirement

Doublelift hopped back into pro play in 2023 after taking a break following TSM’s disastrous 2020 League of Legends World Championship run. He said at the time that he had the itch to compete again and that he was taking a pay cut from streaming to go pro again.

The player said again in his retirement statement that he did take a financial hit coming back to pro play, and said that he would make even less money if he tried to continue to compete next year.

“This next year, because of the climate around the LCS and esports in general it is way way bigger of a sacrifice”, he said.

Doublelift also said that because teams are pulling back on spending, they won’t be able to field rosters that have a chance of winning Wolrds, which was his ultimate goal as a player.

“It just reduces all of the important aspects that are outside of the roster like support staff, just resources for the players to improve and get better. And one of the really big things that was keeping NA, even sort of, in the conversation is well LCS spent a lot [of money] so we were able to attract good talent from other regions,” he said.

He said that he has also accomplished everything he has wanted to in his career outside of winning Worlds. Over his career, Doublelift has won the LCS playoffs eight times and the LCS regular season five times. His best international tournament run was in 2019 where he placed second at the Mid-Season Invitational with Team Liquid.

He has qualified for Worlds eight times and has only managed to break into the top eight once when he placed fourth in the Season 1 tournament. The player said that he has felt that the chances of him winning Worlds has slowly started to slip away as time has gone on, and that he’s ultimately decided to step away from his final big ambition as a pro.

Doublelift said that the next stage of his career is going to be full-time streaming and content creation. Whether the veteran will stay away from the professional spotlight remains to be seen.