Just in case you didn't know by now: League of Legends is a great game. In two short years, LoL's grown to be the leader of the free-to-play pack, and we can't get enough of it. But we've often wondered: just how MANY people like LoL as much as we do? It turns out that quite a few do. In fact, far more than a few. As LoL's first season is wrapped up, Riot released it's official batch of user statistics for their popular MOBA. Let's see how LoL stacks up against the competition, shall we?
- Every day, over 1.4 million players log on to play League of Legends
- There are over 15 million registered accounts
- Between NA and EU servers, peak concurrency has reached 500,000 players
- Players spend an aggregate total of 3.7 million hours in-game every day
- The official League of Legends site gets 6 million hits a day
- League of Legends YouTube videos have nearly 100 million views
- Over 1,690,000 viewers tuned into the online broadcast of the League of Legends Season One Championship, with concurrent viewership peaking at over 210,000
Now, I don't know about you, but where I come from, 1.4 million is a lot of people. With the game already prospering in North America and Europe (despite its server issues), and with Riot's plans to release LoL in Asia, the playerbase can only grow from here. Riot Games CEO Brandon Beck chalks the game's success to the ever-enthusiastic community. "We're most proud of the numbers that show just how many players are truly engrossed in the League of Legends experience," says Beck. "[The community's] loving League of Legends even when they're not playing it—hundreds of thousands of people tuned in for our Season One Qualifiers, for instance. We're very grateful to the League of Legends fans that have made us one of the most popular PC games today."
But what do these numbers really mean? A lot of companies hold their stats close, so it's tough to get any reliable numbers, but Heroes of Newerth confirmed with us this morning that their peak concurrency is near 50,000 players. EVE's peak concurrenct users hit 60,000 a little over a year ago, and back in January, World of Tanks celebrated breaking the peak concurrent user record on a single server with almost 75,000 users online blowing each other up in tanks. [UPDATE: Our previous comparison with TF2 and HoN used inconsistent types of statistics. The current stat comparisons should be more accurate.]
My fellow LoL players, let's celebrate our favorite MOBA's success with a hearty round of Ranked, Normal, and/or Custom games—whatever floats your boat, just as long as you're having a good time (don't forget to check out Wukong!). And if you still haven't dipped into the League of Legends pool, there's no better time than the present to give it a shot. Be sure to join the "PC Gamer" channel when you log in—you never know when we'll be playing next.
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