What a way to celebrate the 10th year of Riot Games' "League of Legends" (LoL). The multiplayer online battle arena video game is now officially the biggest one in the world, boasting around 100 million players per month.
"League of Legends," which was created ten years ago, has now become one of the world's most played video games. In an interview with Polygon, Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill, Riot Games' founders, confirmed that the game has reached another milestone, surpassing 2014's 67 million monthly players.
The gaming company released the full version of the game to the public in October 2009.
In fact, the founders were quite surprised for the turnout of the game's success as they admitted that the game requires high mastery and time commitment to nail the video game. For comparison, one of the most successful games today, "Dota 2," has about 13 million monthly unique players.
'League Of Legends' History
The founders of the game were avid gamers themselves who met at the University of Southern California (USC). Despite traversing career paths toward business, investment firms, and banks, there was one thing that drew them closer: multi-player focused games such as "EverQuest" and "StarCraft."
They eventually separated ways when they got jobs. Dissatisfied as employees, the two gamers decided to bond over video games. What frustrated them while playing was the lack of support video game developers gave to their players. They decided to establish their own game development studio.
The rest is history. They still couldn't believe that "LoL" has now been dubbed as the world's biggest video game.
The Game's Success
After just two months after "League of Legends" official launch in 2009, 100,000 people started playing the video game. The numbers didn't stop growing, though. By 2013, Riot Games was awarded as the 4th best tech company to work for by Business Insider.
"Our players have stuck with us with this incredible loyalty that really challenges us every day to feel like we earn it," Beck said.
"They've helped create this community where all this fan art is shared, and there's all these people to hang out with and there's all these phenomenal streams to watch with the advent of streaming. It's all that stuff that our players have built around us that's allowed this to happen," he added.
