If you’ve ever doubted League of Legends’ popularity, this figure should convince you: its developer, Riot Games, has announced that the game has over 27 million active daily players, and that at peak times up to 7.5 million people are logged in at the same time. In the course of a month, over 67 million people play the game. That’s pretty impressive right there.
League of Legends is a “Massively Online Battle Arena”, or MOBA, and it’s entirely free to play barring the cost of your PC and internet connection. Teams of five “Champions” are pitted against one another, with the aim of destroying the opposing team’s “Nexus”, while defending their own. Players have the option to buy goods in-game with real cash, but these items are generally easy to come by through normal play, or entirely cosmetic, which means there is no pay-to-win mechanic. It’s not a simple game by any means, with hundreds of Champions to choose from (each with their own special abilities) and many strategies to learn, but given these figures, it’s safe to say it’s quite addictive.
Looking at DOTA 2, that other MOBA made by the guys at Valve, its most recent peak figure says that it reached just over 642,000 concurrent players today:
That’s only a teeny tiny portion of LoL’s daily average. So League of Legends is by far the more popular of the two. Sorry, DOTA fans, those numbers don’t lie.
League of Legends’ popularity has soared in the last year or so thanks to its involvement with eSports. Good professional League of Legends players have earned themselves a following not unlike traditional sports people, with millions of gamers tuning into streaming services like Twitch.tv to watch their favourite players in action. Last year’s League of Legends Season 3 Final alone was watched by over 32 million people, with Riot Games calling it “the biggest eSports audience in history”.
If all of this has you keen to join the fun, you can download the client here. Once you’ve installed the game and signed up for a free account, you’re good to go. Just be prepared for a stiff learning curve, which videos like the one below will help you overcome so that you, too, can one day kick butt with the best of them:
