League of Legends is the most-played game in the world, claims Riot

By: Jason McCarthy

  |   October 13th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

There is hardly any argument over the massive popularity of Riot’s League of Legends that was released in October 27, 2009, for the Microsoft Windows platform.

However, the developer claims that its multiplayer online battle area (MOBA) has become the “most played video game in the world.”

The claim is indeed a huge one to make, but Riot has a lot of numbers to support its claim and rather than waiting for someone to stand up and challenge the claim the developer has already released the details.

According to the new infographic, League of Legends has 70 million registered users around the globe.

32 million of these users are found to be actively monthly, whereas 12 million players log in to their League of Legends account on daily basis.

It is not clear whether the figure of daily active players refers to the players who actually play a game, or if it includes users that log in just for a few seconds or minutes for whatever users and then log out.

Another thing revealed in the infographic released by Riot is that 90 percent of the League of Legends players are males.

It went into further details by pointing out that 85 of the registered players lie between the ages of 16 and 30.

The developer also claims that that 60 percent of the players are either currently enrolled in college or have already graduated from “some” college.

While the validity of the figures released by Riot may end up getting debated upon on forums, there is hardly anyone who can deny the fact that League of Legends is indeed one of the most popular online games at the moment.

With the gameplay bearing a strong resemblance to that of Defence of the Ancients (DotA), there are some significant changes in the mechanics.

The character roster and their abilities are completely different from the game that it has taken its inspiration from.

Unlike DoTA, League of Legends uses both the free-to-play and freemium model. What this basically means is that while the game is available to download and play for free, the game also has plenty of paid content that the players can get their hands on through micro-transactions.

This paid content does not affect the gameplay balance significantly, though the experience is considerably enhanced by allowing players to buy additional characters, extra skins and a wide range of utility items.

The game also features much better graphics than the WarCraft III mod, thus requiring a better PC to run smoothly.

One of the most notable differences between the two games is that if a player disconnects during an active DoTA game, he is out of the game permanently, thus leaving his team at a disadvantage.

League of Legends, however, allows players to rejoin the game after they are disconnected from it, which can be due to a number of reasons such as internet reset or load-shedding.

Whether League of Legends manages to stay more popular than other MOBA games, especially after Valve’s Dota 2 comes out later this year is something that remains to be seen.