Boards›Player Behavior

the "League is dying" argument

Voldymort·4/17/2019, 3:05:17 PM·10 votes·8,596 views

Unfortunately, Riot is a bit too secretive about their player population and it's increase over the years

However one thing we can make a deduction based on are the numbers on OP.gg. There's a reddit post from last year that determined that the number of league accounts is thus:

Place Region Accounts % of overall

  1. China 117.162.686 57,19%
  2. Europe West 21.362.005 10,43%
  3. North America 18.440.603 9,00%
  4. Korea 13.195.346 6,44%
  5. Europe NE 12.360.192 6,03%
  6. Brazil 5.952.086 2,91%
  7. Turkey 4.350.794 2,12%
  8. Latin AmericaN3.273.837 1,60%
  9. Latin AmericaS3.153.161 1,54%
  10. Russia 3.118.723 1,52%
  11. Oceania 1.699.651 0,83%
  12. Japan 784.344 0,38%
  • Overall 204.853.428 100%

they used op.gg and an article on a chinese website thats no longer seems to be available

i went ahead and checked the numbers for today and came to the following:

Europe West 24,528,211 North America 20,555,359 Korea 14,731,390 Europe NE 13,754,905 Brasil 7,392,947 Turkey 5,126,744 LAN 4,078,239 LAS 3,820,347 Russia 3,544,295 Oceania 1,940,075 Japan 1,012,888

for a grand total of 100,485,400, that is 12% higher than last year's number of 87.690.742 by 12,794,658

for some reason the Garena servers weren't included in last year's ad hoc census so i've included the ones from this year below:

Singapore 412,777 Indonesia 157,350 Philioppines 2,825,969 Taiwan 2,077,207 Vietnam 3,845,345 Thailand 356,188

if i had a way to add the chinese server numbers, i would. alas, i don't.

that doesn't look like a decline to me...

[fiora-cool]

30 Comments

Meredith Stout4/17/2019, 3:06:55 PM11 votes

How much of those accounts are active on daily basis? Also, almost every person have 1 or more smurf accounts.

Edit; To ape that downvoted me, give me your answer instead of hiding behind downvote.

Edit 2; And people wonder why they get trolls in their game. This boards is root of all what is wrong in this game.

Karunamon4/17/2019, 3:15:39 PM7 votes

Difficulty: Riot's revenue as of the end of 2018 is down to 2014 levels.

Febos4/17/2019, 3:32:08 PM6 votes

Here is a bit more info for you. This one has concurrent players/games over the week instead of registered accounts.

{quoted}

Lolalytics 11.319 million Platinum+ players in ranked in the last 7 days, worldwide.

If 11 million players reflects a "dead game" I wonder what you consider games like CS:GO, Dota 2, etc

Mind you, those are just Platinum+ players.

If you want get really technical, you may instead look at the "All Days" data, which shows the average number of players (technically it's games) during X patch. For example:

The number of players/games is stable in between patches and the number isn't low by any means. Again, those are just Ranked matches.

Finally, there's good old Twitch.tv. While it doesn't reflect how many players are playing it does reflect the interest on the game. Compare it to the previously mentioned CS:GO and Dota and you have plenty of evidence to debunk the "League is dead" claim.

We also have this: LeagueOfGraphs. It has the number of matches from the last two days, Normal and Ranked, worldwide, which reinforces the data from LoLalytics. Right now it says "2,635,684 matches (Last 2 days)".

2,635,684 matches is a lot. Assuming the average player goes for 5 games every day, that means we can only consider 527,136 matches as concurrent games. Every match has 10 players, so that's 5,271,360 active players in the last two days, across all regions LeagueOfGraphs has access to.

In reality, the average player goes for ~4 days every day, which means at least 3,294,605 concurrent players every day.

Also, keep in mind we're only talking about Summoner's Rift. If we go to ARAM data, it shows 1,101,613 matches.

We have plenty of sources to debunk the whole "League is dying" argument. It may not be growing like it used to, but not dying; not yet.

Dracocrash4/17/2019, 6:57:48 PM5 votes

You DO realize the number of league accounts will always increase right? The real question is how many ACTIVE accounts does league have today compared to a few years ago?

LankPants4/18/2019, 4:12:36 AM4 votes

There's an inherent flaw to the logic you're using. Inactive accounts are still counted unless they're removed, which only happens to sub level 30 accounts. We don't know how many of the 24,528,211 accounts on EUW are simply sitting inactive. We can't say whether the increase in inactive accounts over the course of 2018 would be less than, equal to or greater than the 2166206 new accounts created or even what fraction of these new accounts are active.

Even within your statistics it is still entirely possible that there is a decline occurring. Your statistics do not say anything about player engagement, rather they simply approximate the number of players who have ever played League up to that point. It is almost impossible for this number to decrease due to how infrequent deletion of accounts is.

To actually judge if League is in decline or not we'd have to use statistics that told us something about the current playerbase's engagement. These could be stats such as the number of games played compared to this time last year or ideally the number of active accounts compared to this time last year. To my knowledge we do not have statistics that can tell us this.

Death by Glamour4/17/2019, 7:15:09 PM4 votes

Number of accounts =/= the number of active players

JJuusharou4/18/2019, 5:08:00 PM4 votes

Straight up wrong.

Go to op.gg , go to NA, go to leaderboards.

"There are currently 862,576 summoners on Summoner's Rift"

You know what that means right ? Only 862,576 accounts, in TOTAL, has played ranked on NA server this year. Taking into account that at least 1/3 of those accounts are smurfs, then it is clear, league is dying, fast.

Number of league accounts doesnt mean shit when you are including every account in existence, I can still search up my perma banned accounts, they still count as accounts. Think about that. It means they are taking perma banned accounts, accounts that havent been played on since season 1, dormant accounts, accounts that play 1 normal game per month, and so on, into the count. Makes no sense.

The fact of the matter is , league is dying. And that is for the best, because they have completely destroyed the game, the only people in riot still doing a good job, is the skins team. The rest of them dont deserve their jobs.

BALDG1VEN BOOMER4/17/2019, 3:15:46 PM3 votes

League had plateaued awhile ago even if more people are playing the question remains how often are they playing? This could just be old players playing every now and then

A better stat to look at would be monthly players. I use to play this game almost daily now I barely play monthly.

Not to also mention Riot did state people were more likely to stop playing after URF is gone.

Their revenue has dropped. Though this could be cause of all the free things they give out now.

I personally have noticed more increased surveys asking about other games and such for comparative reasons.

DrippyBrownHole4/17/2019, 6:25:42 PM3 votes

It's bots my dude

Xidphel4/18/2019, 3:17:04 PM2 votes

I mean, it IS dying. So are you and so am I. Everyone and everything has started dying ever since its inception.

YouCanBeSaved4/18/2019, 11:56:46 PM2 votes

I hope league goes bankrupt.

Telephone Booth4/23/2019, 3:13:29 AM1 votes

I doubt that its dying, unless by dying you mean how everything dies due to age. But either way, this cant be used scientifically. The data is too vague and uncredible (is that a word?). Op.gg in my experience, is a highly unreliable source when it comes to accuracy.

nelogis4/18/2019, 7:29:53 AM1 votes

that determined that the number of league accounts is thus

Yeah nice, and how many of those are active? And how many are smurfs? I personally have 5 accounts what about you?

Pandemic Punch4/18/2019, 7:50:04 AM1 votes

Let's also keep in mind that League of Legends 2018 World's was the most viewed e-sport in history with over 100 million viewers. That is 20 million more than the 2018 Super Bowl. Impressive even if most Super Bowl viewers are NA residents compared to League which is worldwide.

Interest in the game is still growing.

OP, check those numbers again by the end of the year. There will probably be more active accounts by the end of the year. Every beginning of the year, there are far less players. So, it is even more impressive that the numbers are already that high.