4m play League of Legends every day

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 18 November, 2011

One of the top 5 PC games in US and Europe.

Four million people play League of Legends every day, Riot Games has announced.

That's an increase of 280 per cent since July 2011. It is one of the top five PC games in the US and Europe.

The DOTA game has 11.5 million monthly active players. Peak concurrency reaches 1.3 million. The registered player base is over 30 million worldwide. Over a billion games of League of Legends have been played since launch.

League of Legends is about to enter its second competitive season, which features a $5 million prize pool - the largest in eSports history.

"The incredible passion and dedication of our players is positively inspiring," said Brandon Beck, co-founder and CEO of Riot Games.

"Our community's boundless enthusiasm is why they are central to every decision we make at Riot."

League of Legends, which launched in October 2009, is a free-to-play online action strategy game inspired by the iconic Defense of the Ancients Warcraft III mod.

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About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

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Comments (12) Latest comment 6 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • amfamaster #1 6 months ago

    hon 4life, so damn addictive i hate whole genre :s

  • Sinz3r #2 6 months ago

    So they have more concurrent players than the top 10 games in Steam?

    http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

    This I find a little hard to believe. I don't really know what S2 have done to annoy the games press, but League of Legends really know how to market.

  • infernox1 #3 6 months ago

    theres no doubt that the biggest game in the esports scene atm is starcraft 2. LOL seems to cater to a younger audience, just like runescape.

  • swisstony #4 6 months ago

    such a shame the community around it and within it is easily the most toxic and vile i've encountered, and i've stuck it out for over 600 games. taking a break because there's only so much infantile 'your mom dies of cancer' comments i can take.

  • swisstony #5 6 months ago

    oh and on the popularity front regarding sc2, at live events sc2 has dwarfed all the lol season one comps i've watched on esl, but LoL has had many times more viewers on the streams than starcraft, so much so that i've seen many commenters thinking that the numbers are faked. They refuse to believe LoL is fast becoming in the west what sc2 is in Korea.

  • Zaiz #6 6 months ago

    Because S2's game is massively less popular than LoL. It would be like giving significant press time to Dwarf Fortress.

    Also, I wouldn't say that LoL caters to a younger audience. SC2 and LoL cater to the exact same audience, its just that LoL is much easier to pick up and play initially.

  • Burton2000 #7 6 months ago

    @swisstony I believe they broke the record for the most viewed live e sport event in the west with their stream of the season one final at dreamhack.

  • boogiepop #8 6 months ago

    bullshit propaganda to distract people from DOTA 2

  • foamy #9 6 months ago

    Despite LoL being unbalanced, and permanent changes which make the buying of champions a bit frustrating because of the constant nerfing/buffing, it's still one of the best games around. The art style is just massively captivating to everyone, even to girls which hate games altogether.

    Also in what regards LoL vs S2, LoL is free so I suppose it's normal if the player base increases faster.

    In what concerns this following the freemium path, you can have every champion and rune (enhancements to your character, essential to the strategy of your build. you cannot buy them with money). Although you can buy boosts for winning the double XP and IP (the in-game currency), it's not anything a player who likes to play actually cares. People who invest money in the game can only evolve more quickly to level 30 (the cap) which honestly no one cares, because if you do that that'll only be worse for you because your skill won't be following your level for matchmaking.

    All in all, nice game. Only thing I can tell you is the community is full of angry kids. Protip: don't play solo queue, always team up with at least 1 or 2 mates so you can actually make the difference if you want to win. Even then, i'd advise you to play with 5 friends, so you can kick those mofo kids ass and troll them.

    Play LoL, the feeling of winning a well fought match makes you feel like god, as I suppose HoN and other action online rpgs make you feel, but as I said in the beggining, the art style is just fucking awesome.

  • tenofspades #10 6 months ago

    And still LoL doesn't add guilds, or voice chat.

  • davisorle #11 6 months ago

    Post deleted at 20:44:35 16-04-2012

  • Burton2000 #12 6 months ago

    @tenofspades clan system is being added for the start of season 2 they have confirmed