The League of Legends or LoL is a role playing game that took the world by storm. Released on October 27, 2009, this was well received by the public and has since been played in most of the countries around the world. This game was developed and published by Riot Games based on the very popular [pullquote_right]Now 7.5 million play the game at the same time each day![/pullquote_right]game Defense of the Ancients. Essentially, these two games are the same with both teams trying to destroy enemy structures to achieve victory. However, LoL has proven time and time again that the differences that it implemented made it more popular than its inspiration.
LoL is currently being played in 6 out of 7 continents with tournaments being held in selected countries. Local tournaments are hosted by their respective countries in order to pick a team that will represent the said country in [pullquote_left]32 million people watched the World Championships online and on television via broadcasting[/pullquote_left]the more profound tournaments. Tournaments are held, in ascending order, locally, nationally, regionally, internationally, and continentally. The ultimate tournament is known as the World Championships. In this tournament, only the best of the best teams participate resulting to the best matches that the world has ever seen. The recently concluded World Championships saw SK Telecom T1 as the champions and Royal Club Huang Zu as the runner up. An estimate of 32 million people watched the World Championships online and on television via broadcasting. The sheer number of fans and players of this game has prompted several media outlets to proclaim the game as one of the all-time greats in the gaming industry.
The prevalence of LoL games in the modern world is so massive that the developers of the game are finding it hard to cope with the sheer number of players that are logging on and playing every day of the year. A good example of this is in the EU server. People playing in the EU server usually have to wait to be able to log on and play the game. The sheer number of players also caused multiple errors and down times in servers of the game. Riot Games is currently increasing the number of servers to cope with the demands of players around the world.
For those non-believers, how about an info-graphic breaking everything down:
League of Legends Info-Graphic
[box_light]Update: These statistics were reported in 2012 by Riot games, since then they have updated!
In a recent article on the Wall Street Journal, Riot reported that they have increased their daily players to 27 Million! Nothing wrong with an extra 15 Million players in the course of 2 years!
The article also reports a nice year for Riot in 2013 bringing in $624 million in microtransactions.
Source – WSJ [/box_light]
