14 DAY TRIAL // League of Legends is one of the biggest multiplayer games in the world, and its yearly World Championship competition is one of the most watched eSports events in the entire world.
The game belongs to the multiplayer online battle arena genre, a highly popular type of video game that began with a Warcraft 3 map that evolved into a mod and then a full-fledged game of its own, Dota 2.
The basic premise is that two teams of five champions each compete on a symmetrical map divided into 3 different lanes, and attempt to gradually gain an advantage and push the action to the enemy base, ending with the destruction of the main enemy building.
This is done with the help of waves of non-playable units and careful micromanagement of heroes, with teamplay being crucial to victory. The rewarding nature of playing the game with your friends and cooperating to defeat online opponents made the game insanely popular, with developer Riot Games boasting over 50 million monthly players.
The fact that League of Legends is entirely free to play, with the devs making money solely through cosmetic microtransactions, and regularly updating the game with new content and balance tweaks, made it a very popular competitive video game, so much so that its biggest competitions are becoming major eSports events.
The 2013 World Championship managed to completely sell out the Staples Center in Los Angeles, a venue that has the capacity to hold a little over 12k people. Its online viewership was much larger though, with over 32 million people following the events on the Internet, with a peak of more than 8.5 million concurrent viewers registered during the finals.
This year, developer and event organizer Riot Games expects to attract much more people to the event, both on location and online.
The upcoming League of Legends 2014 World Championship has the potential to completely sell out the Sangam Stadium, in Seoul, South Korea, at least that's what Riot Games' EVP of eSports, Dustin Beck thinks.
"We do expect to sell out," he tells Polygon. "Our early ticket sales have all sold out. We're trying to create more capacity and flexibility, but so far so good."
Beck says that the venue has a total capacity of over 65k people, and that after Riot Games builds the fancy stage it designed, the stadium will still be able to house over 45k spectators.
The League of Legends 2014 World Championship is scheduled to take place in four cities, spread over five weeks, and culminating with the World Finals, held at Sangam Stadium on October 19, this year.