Esports has overtaken the world recently, and the biggest one is League of Legends. According to GameSpot, in 2014 the amount of monthly players was around 67 million players. However, two years later the number has now soared past 100 million players. The reasoning for the missing numbers of last year is that “co-founders Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck dislike talking figures such as this.” However, increasing your number of monthly active players by a little less than 40 million is a large number.
Through the founder’s travels, they described the feeling of achieving such numbers as unreal. What is awesome is as they go on their travels to live events they get to actually meet some of their players. What Beck said is cool about meeting their fans in person is that “only then does it start to feel real. Otherwise, they’re just numbers on a screen all over the world.” This is cool since seeing a number of 100 million players is cool and all but to actually go out and meet the players behind the game is even better since you know that this number is actually genuine and is not just some dream.
With the game as a free to play it isn’t too surprising that such a large number of players have started to join in and help make the game one of the most played games around the world. Riot is trying out some new ideas that might not use League of Legends specific properties. For a company that has seen a lot of success in one game, it is always challenging to come up with something new as players always expect a lot from the end product, but it is refreshing to see that there will be something new coming out.