LoL. Which game has the most players?
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Scale of popularity:
- 100 million players per month according to a 2016 interview;
- An average of 8 million players logged in at peak each day (as of September 2019);
- in October 2021, games from the League of Legends series (excluding Valorant) could boast as many as 180 million active users.
- in 2023, about 150 million people play LoL every month (source).
It's amazing how many famous games originate as amator mods for bigger titles. Before Playerunknown's Battlegrounds allowed the battle royale to explode with unequaled power, its author had developed a mod for ARMA 2 based on identical rules. Counter-Strike was originally a mod to Half-Life. Finally, before we got the League of Legends, the rules of MOBA genre were conceived as a mod for Starcraft called Aeon of Strife , and were then fleshed out in the DOTA modification for Warcraft 3.
All of these fully realized their potential only as independent, commercial titles. It was no different with the League of Legends, which polished and popularized the concept underlying this type of games. Today, LoL is not only an insanely popular game as such, but also one of the most important e-sports games, as well as one of the most viewed games on Twitch – the 2018 Mid-Season Invitational tournament was followed by as many as 127 million viewers at the same time. With the bulk of them coming from China.
Data on the active player base in League of Legends comes from 2016 and talks about 100 million people logging in every month. Unofficial estimates, on the other hand, indicate that in mid-2022, about 120 million people played Riot Games' hit, with up to 180 million playing all games in this series (excluding Valorant). Currently, according to unofficial information, about 150 million people play LoL alone per month.
