League of Legends has been around for quite some time as it released back in October 2009. This may lead people to believe that the game’s popularity has waned significantly but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
The original League of Legends game and the other games that form part of its universe such as League of Legends: Wild Rift, Legends of Runeterra, Teamfight Tactics, and Fight for the Golden Spatula have 180 million monthly active users. This statistic was recorded in October and is a ridiculous feat considering that Valve’s Steam has an estimated 120 million active users.
The original League of Legends game hasn’t fallen out of favor with Riot Games either as it is still being updated with new content, buffs, and nerfs.
These figures are astounding especially when one considers that Steam has a gargantuan lineup of games in its catalog compared to Riot Games five titles in its League of Legend series. Another surprising piece of information is that Valorant’s 14 million monthly active users are not even included in the 180 million League of Legends monthly users.
These impressive figures are only slightly less impressive when Riot Games explained what it considers to be monthly active users, “Monthly active users (‘MAUs’) are defined as the number of players who accessed a game, and in this case, the calendar month of October. A player who accesses two of our games would be counted as two users.” The reason that these numbers can be considered only slightly less impressive is due to the fact that the majority of the users are most likely not playing all five of the League of Legends series every single month so the figures are only somewhat inflated. Another reason for the mammoth figures is that League of Legends: Wild Rift is a free mobile game that is basically a low-fat version of the main entry in the series made specifically for mobile. The mobile game was introduced to many parts of the world in October 2020 and in China on October 8 this year.
Once again even taking League of Legends: Wild Rift into consideration these are impressive figures. Riot Games seem to be on quite the roll as it also has an animated series called Arcane based around League of Legends coming out on Netflix sooner rather than later. Although Riot Games seems untouchable right now Valve does not have much to worry about as Riot Games has a relatively limited lineup that does not directly compete with many of the games in Steam’s lineup other than Dota 2.
League of Legends is available to play for free on PC.
Source: PC Gamer
