The timeline presents the number of viewers of League of Legends championships finals worldwide from 2013 to 2017. In 2017 LoL championships took place in China and attracted nearly 58 million viewers from around the world.
League of Legends eSports– additional information
League of Legends (LoL) was introduced to gamers around the world by Riot Games in 2009. The premise of the game is for a team of champions to strategically work through a series of objectives in order to destroy the opposing team’s home base or 'Nexus'. From its introduction, it quickly became one of the most popular games featured in eSports competitions. In fact, in 2013 LoL had an estimated 70 million monthly active users (MAU) worldwide and by 2016 that number had increased by another 30 million MAU. Additionally, the League of Legends World Championship in 2016 stands as having the second highest viewership of any eSports tournament, with 43 million unique viewers worldwide.
In terms of dollar value, LoL tournaments had a combined prize pool of 12.02 million U.S. dollars in 2017 – the third highest amount attributable to a single game. In 2015, LoL's prize pool accounted for 11 percent of the total prize pool money awarded to eSports’ event winners. When looking at leading eSports tournaments ranked by prize pools, The International 2017, featuring DOTA 2, is the leader with 24.69 million U.S. dollars granted to winners, while the LOL World Championships in 2016 and 2017 provided respectively 5.07 and 4.6 million dollars as award money. The reason why these figures differ vastly is due to Riot’s strategy of focusing on providing players with a salary instead of raising the prize pool via direct or crowd-funding.
