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eScalation: League of Legends player numbers now double those of 15 months ago

League of Legends player numbers: fairly strong, all told.

If the League of Legends community of January 2014 were to take on its former October 2012 self in hand-to-hand combat, they’d almost certainly win. Why? Because the fist-to-face rate of 67 million people is at least twice that of 32 million people. Fact.

Riot Games are “tremendously appreciative” this afternoon. If you’re even a once-a-month LoL player, you get to soak up some of that appreciation – because you’ve contributed 0.000001 of the 67 millions they’ve amassed in players over the past five years or so.

Riot didn’t come to that number by simply adding up player accounts present and past. No: each of those 67m players are active, booting up League of Legends at least once per month.

These days, more than 27 million play LoL every day: again, more than double the equivalent figure from October 2012 (12 million). And more than 7.5 million are playing simultaneously at peak play time on an average day – 4.5 million more than were doing the same in 2012.

None of this is exactly a surprise to you lot, who’ve watched LoL scale the walls of eSports and become a Coca-Cola sponsored, Staples Center-filling, US government-movingbona fide pop culture phenomenon. A game that makes Dota 2 look small. Dota 2: the most-played game on Steam by some margin. But it’s ludicrous to see, when you step back and take stock, isn’t it?