Bottom line: The League of Legends franchise is home to some of the most successful PC (and now cross-platform) games ever released, most notably League, the classic MOBA that never seems to stop receiving updates. To quantify this success, developer Riot Games took to Twitter to display its latest player numbers. Across the League (AKA Runeterra) family of games, Riot attracted 180 million active players in October alone.
That’s a huge number, and it even surpasses the lifetime sales of major releases like Grand Theft Auto V. Rockstar’s satirical action title hit 150 million lifetime sales in August, but the number of users of the game is counted. Suspenders. monthly. Of course, League is free, while GTA V is still a $ 30 product.
Regardless, while Riot did not elaborate on how it calculates monthly players in its historical tweet, it did offer some details to PC Gamer. First of all, all League of Legends games are considered here: League of Legends, its mobile version known as Wild Rift, the card fighter Legends of Runeterra, the automatic fighter Teamfight Tactics and “Fight for the Golden Spatula”, which It is the Chinese variant of TFT.
Also, Riot says that “monthly players” refers to anyone who starts one of their games. If the same person plays all five games mentioned above, they will count as five active players in Riot’s calculations.
In other words, “180 million players” may not be entirely accurate if we think of these players as unique individuals. However, this is still an impressive figure.
Thank you to our global community for helping Runeterra reach new heights! 180 million players in October and growing! pic.twitter.com/7w9goYBeBM
– Riot Games #RiotXArcane (@riotgames) November 1, 2021
The studio has built this global franchise from the ground up for approximately 12 years. As of 2018, the team employed about 2,500 people, which is probably why it has recently been able to branch out into new genres. If you go back in time and talk to a League player 10 years ago, I doubt they would have expected to hear that this indie MOBA creator would ever create an ultra-popular hero shooter to rival Counter-Strike and Overwatch (to a lesser extent).
On an interesting note, the number of League players far exceeds Steam’s monthly active users, with the latter hovering around 120 million MAU last year. If you’re interested in learning more about Steam’s recent successes, Valve’s latest “Year in Review” news article explains in more detail.
Either way, we wish Riot the best for the future. Hopefully the company’s next MMO turns out to be a decent one at launch; the genre is too outdated for another generic entry.
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