League of Legends Flys Under Radar, is Now Most Played Video Game in the World
posted Saturday Oct 20, 2012 by Nicholas DiMeo
Either I have been living under a rock or color me one who is not a fan of things that look like World of Warcraft but until last month, I did not know the online, free-to-play game League of Legends existed. It may be a combination of both because the game is apparently the largest game in the world, at least statistically. The two-teamed online battle arena video game has been popular since it's release three years ago and has taken the world by storm with its dueling gameplay, despite my incorrect notions of level 90 Paladins that I imagined roaming through the game. In fact, the game is so big that Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends, posted an infographic with some interesting figures, which they seem to like to do annually.
The studio used many different sources to gather its stats and said that the real-time strategy game hit an average of 3 million users who were online at the same time in July, which smoked the peak count of 1.4 million players from the Xbox 360 version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Riot Games also noted that 12 million players will roll through the game's servers each and every day, and 32 million players sign in every month. To put that into perspective, during World of Warcraft's best month, it only had a total of 12 million players. Currently, League of Legends has 70 million registrations, but to be fair I must reiterate that it is a free-to-play game.
We have a couple more notable statistics and the complete infographic after the break.
Riot also mentioned that the game pulls in an average of 1 billion hours of play per month and is currently being played in over 145 countries around the world. For some more reference, Halo has only logged 2 billion hours of total playtime since its launch in 2004. I would like to take this time to point out that over 90 percent of its players are male, with 85 percent aged between 16 and 30 years. Only 60 percent are enrolled in or have completed some college. With that, I now formally request more educated females pick up this game and give it a go!
We have the complete, cool-looking infographic below and you can hit the source link underneath that to sign up and start playing today! Let me know what you think in the comments below, as the game is currently being downloaded in the background as I write this.
