More people play in the League, but spend less money.

Sleeping Bat·3/4/2020, 1:19:10 PM·1 votes·7,004 views

Since the release of LoL (2009), the popularity of the game has grown at an incredible rate: 2011 – more than 11 million players per month, 2014 – more than 67 million, 2017 – more than 100 million, it’s breathtaking, isn’t it? For many years, the popularity of the game has been growing and 2020 is no exception. Currently, the active user base is more than 80 million, and more than 30 million players enter the game every day. https://www.mc-market.org/threads/542009/

Also the highest number of active players in a month was in March 2019 - 115 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_by_monthly_active_player_count

Now let's look at the Legend's income: 2015 - 1.63 billions, 2016 - 1.8 billions, 2017 - 2,1 billions, 2018 - 1.4 billions. https://www.statista.com/statistics/806975/lol-revenue/

League of Legends generated $1.5 billion revenue in 2019 https://dotesports.com/league-of-legends/news/league-of-legends-generated-1-5-billion-revenue-in-2019

What can be understood from these numbers? The fact that pandering to Chinese internet cafe market is not profitable.

58 Comments

Pika3103/4/2020, 1:34:18 PM24 votes

Rito has been intentionally chasing away customers, openly telling us that they don't want our money & other such. Through their direct insults to players, even individuals; unwanted reworks, coupled with extreme refusal for reverts; intentional reduction in quality of skins & cosmetics in favor of quantity; and et cetera & so forth...

League's numbers have been on an exponential decline for several years now & the severity of 2019's decline especially shows how bad it's becoming. I personally haven't given money to Rito for many years after their forcing Patch 4.13 onto Live, in direct opposition to community outrage & their complete refusal to revert Patch 4.13, again in direct opposition to community outrage. Rito is 1-billion percent out of touch with their community.

Gradeient3/4/2020, 2:02:22 PM12 votes

There´s no data from riot about how many people play the game since 2016. i think the game is still incredibly popular but have lost some of its playerbase over the past 4 years. I think that currently League has about 60 million players per month, it´s still a gigantic number but nothing compared to it´s glory days. The playerbase drop is due to bad decisions that Riot has been making over the past few years, releasing uncounterable Champions with overloaded kits and because of that, it has become completely impossible for Riot to keep all Champions at a relative balance state. The revenue had a slight increase because Riot released more skins in 2019, they brought back Star Guardians which generated some millions of dollars. But I don´t think it´s the playerbase that is spending less money, i think the playerbase is slowly decaying and the players don´t feel so excited about the game to spend money on it.

SgtAwesomeness3/4/2020, 2:03:11 PM12 votes

Shocker, The Chinese ruin everything

Iljos3/4/2020, 3:14:11 PM9 votes

as someone who spent 4k on the game from seasons 2-5 and 0 after that I can tell you that the game is too shit, the company is too shit and their """player behavior""" systems are absolute fucking shit.

ModAcademy Kayn3/4/2020, 3:13:52 PM9 votes

Maybe because they're not pandering to Chinese Internet Cafe's, and even to the end of the Boards, you people still don't understand that the Chinese are not to blame for everything you dislike in League.

Snowleaf3/4/2020, 4:08:01 PM6 votes

Pretty sure in the most recent monthly data from January league made the most money of any PC game for the month. And you can go back years without seeing it drop out of the top 3 for any month. It is near the top in money and in views every single month for years and years and there is no sign that is changing anytime soon.

You can call it a bad game. You can say it is no longer fun for you. It however is not dying and it sure as hell isnt dead.

Bulshlaka3/4/2020, 1:45:40 PM6 votes

those numbers disregard China which has double or over western League player base. Chinese spend a lot more than the western players

revenue doesn't mean much it's about successful skin/skin lines that release in those years Sonas Ultimate for example was probably a huge % of the total revenue of the company that year GG MF was a complete flop in 2018

also Event passes are extremely efficient especially for people that don't want any particular skin 80% of my skins are from free shit i get from playing. 1 Event pass gives me around 5-6 skins nearly all my legendaries are from the hextech boxes also alt accounts and new accounts of people getting banned don't spend money on them if your main gets banned you are very likely not spending money on the game anymroe

so You have to look at the revenue and make informed judgements and not look at the stats blindly because they aren't representative of anything

again those numbers don't include the chinese market

I know that tencent completely controlls the chinese league client/market side

if riot is tailoring many of its skins to the chinese market then they DO HAVE the stats and are making A DELIBERATE CHOICE to tailor them to that market

You do realize that riot has a team of financial dudes that look at REAL INTERNAL statistics that the public has 0 access to So you saying that what they are doing is wrong based on estimates made by 3rd party sites is fake news

BigFBear3/4/2020, 3:44:10 PM3 votes

So didn't you say that LoL is losing players? Well looks totally different here huh?

PRoxy oQ3/4/2020, 8:22:47 PM3 votes

playing since S2 honestly not worth giving money to them as they refuse to listen and make game worse and worse each patch since S3. Dota will outlive this this was something of a line of frontcrap or w/e kids play/played.

Roamcell3/5/2020, 7:24:58 AM3 votes

This game, from the very lobby, is a rigged piece of garbage that's made to keep you hooked. I have started capturing snapshots of all the games I play, and it's obviously intentional. I win lane. I farm. I hold turret and destroy enemy turret. Meanwhile, my jungler doesn't even take the fucking turtles, let alone herald or dragons, 19 out of 20 games. And what about my mid? Losing lane like it's nobody's business, or my botlane with half the farm and twice the deaths?

So the mechanic is this: I win lane and destroy turret but during teamfights, even if I'm two levels above, my team gets shat upon. And don't even get me started on when the enemy jungler babysits my lane and my jungler farms 5 meters away. And this because i have a 55% winrate in draft.

I regularly yearly quit this garbage of a game and you should too, or at least play it for a month or so a year, and then let it rot. There's plenty of actual other free good games around.

And of course, don't give them a dime because the game doesn't deserve it, with all its malpractices:

  1. It's intentionally flawed to increase punishment reward effect and artificially keep players hooked, making good people think defeat is their fault when matchmaking puts them in team with mouth breathing subhumans that should not own a fucking computer, and that grief, troll, feed and blame others when they're 1 7 3 (my average jungler, not shitting you)
  2. It's full of hidden mechanics. Matchmaking knows perfectly your average distance to your team, your teamfight proficiency, your lane domination factor among dozens other parameters, and uses those to keep you as nearly below 50% winrate as possible, so that you don't advance unless you play with somebody else whos' good, only to achieve slightly better, below 50% winrate
  3. Have you noticed how your winrate drops dramatically after each S? Win an S game solo, prepare to get 75iq feeding trash mid, bot and jg. I have the screenshots.
  4. It's an intentionally toxic pile of flaming shit. Griefers and trolls, stupidly obvious to detect mathematically even for a college dropout with all the metric data they collect, are left to rampage. Point is they're good for business, since controversy fuels the punishment reward effect above. Once, you got a message that thanked you because you reported a subhuman. This has stopped 4 years ago I think, at this point. Feeders and inters are literally unpunished.
  5. It's a miserable, subhuman fueled pay to win experience. Every new champ comes with an increased winrate due to mongoloid obvious op stats (see sett shield, sylas when it came out, etc. I could go on non-stop i guess), while off meta old ones get nerfed into submission.
  6. Meanwhile, annoying and toxic garbage champs like yASSuo (from the well known mentally challenged individual that's so dear to rito, and that invented similar other cash grab garbage), keep getting buffed every season while rito says they're nerfing them (and in reality in paper they're actually literally buffing. Real fact. This happens all the time. Google it.), for the simple reason that they attract mouth breathers that spend $$$ for shiny shit.
  7. Technical trash. You really think you're so bad at farming? I've watched my replays to realize that I deal last hits to the cs and they die without gold retribution, when there's no minion hitting them. It's simple math. If the thing has 90hp and you deal 100, it's yours, but magically, repeatedly so happens that just because there's allied minions near you, that last hit wasn't yours. It's obviously latency, but what sort of a piece of shit networking subsystem allows this. And I fucking play with 50ms.
  8. Cheats. Once there was a site called elobuddy where people could download scripts for auto farm, auto last hit enemy champions, auto dodge enemy skills, auto use items like botrk, and similar other, even more advanced, spineless garbage. Now rito claims that this piece of trash 'engine' they have is better at handling scripts but guess what, it's not. You can regularly see those unrankeds doing 25 - 3 in a level 0 champ, once every 10 or so games. They're not regular smurfs. They're cheaters. Quite probably cheater smurfs. Check your games. Look at how many times you get those. Second my screenshots, it's one in every 15 games or less.
  9. These very forums. A piece of flaming pile of trash that can't even pull a numbered list properly, where never ever happened that an actual rito employee ever considered anything that was written.

Seriously. Quit at least for 10 months a year. It's not hard. The game is garbage. Do your placements for the kick of it and maybe play some more to get out of elo hell, but then stop.

5050BS3/4/2020, 10:37:37 PM2 votes

I love the Eternals but will never spend $ on them.

In Game Player Flash Eternal "Look I spent 5$"

Exodus2473/4/2020, 5:34:42 PM2 votes

Hey bat, keep up the good work, i dont understand why people are trying to defend riot at this point by nitpicking your comments, but you do show your statistics and i applaud you for it. Sad to see that the game has even come to this, but what else can we really do right?

P.S. i apologize for my comment on my post awhile ago, i misread what you put, i made a big dumb.

Silenceisgolden3/5/2020, 4:00:24 AM1 votes

I've purposely not spent a dime on this shit game since they banned my original account in like 2012, I hope they go bankrupt. They deserve it.

Semper144p3/5/2020, 12:03:01 AM1 votes

What if a lot more people are buying the passes rather than skins directly?

Ryva3/4/2020, 4:20:30 PM1 votes

They also ban a lot of toxic whale customers that spend less when remaking an account.

Chinese market is down for them so profit from China is down thanks to the C-Virus.

Bleeding themselves making all these new games at the worst time when most companies are losing gains.