14 DAY TRIAL // Riot Games has revealed that over 11.2 million concurrent viewers tuned in to watch the League of Legends World Championship finals that took place in Seoul, South Korea.
League of Legends is the biggest multiplayer online battle arena game on the planet, developer Riot Games showing at the beginning of the year that over 27 million gamers play it each and every day, with a total of 67 million unique players trying on Champions for size each month.
2013 was a huge year for League of Legends, and 2014 was an even bigger one, with the company registering incredible revenue, considering that it uses a free-to-play model based on free weekly Champion rotations and only features cosmetic microtransactions.
Thus, the Season 4 World Championship was a pretty competition, bringing in contestants from all across the world, in addition to millions and millions of fans wanting to see the best in action on Summoner's Rift.
All in all, the event accounted for 15 days of competition, with over 100 hours of live content broadcast via 40 media partners in an impressive 19 languages. The 16 qualifying teams from around the Globe played group stages in Singapore and Taipei, before moving to Korea for the final showdown.
The breakdown
A total of 288 million cumulative daily unique views were tallied over the course of the entire tournament, across all stages from Taipei to Seoul, adding up to over 179 million hours of esports watched online, live all across the world.
This does not count users who also watched the recordings, and to put things into perspective, last year's Season 3 World Championship only totaled 70 million hours of live content consumed.
In any case, "real" sports generally wish they had these numbers. The final match between Samsung white and Royal Club was by far the most popular of the events, with a peak concurrent viewers registered at 11.2 million fans, all watching the games at once.
During the finals, fans tuned in and watched content for an average of 67 minutes, beating the average of 42 minutes registered during 2013's championship.
The final match took place on Sangam Stadium, one of the venues of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, in front of a crowd of over 40k people.
Riot Games intends to unveil its upcoming plans for competitive play in 2015 before the end of the year, so stay tuned and we'll come back with the news as soon as it drops.
