Riot Claims League of Legends Is “the Most Played Video Game”

According to the popular MOBA developer, League of Legends has more than twice as many peak concurrent players as Modern Warfare 3 on Xbox Live.

What do you think the most played video game, at this very moment, is? The one with the most people playing it right now. World of Warcraft? Or maybe Modern Warfare 3? What about Starcraft? Korea has entire television networks dedicated to the game.

None of those, says Riot Games, developer of the popular MOBA League of Legends. Indeed, the developer claims that, “By hours played per month,” its own League of Legends is, “the most played video game in the world.” And they’ve drawn up a massive infographic to prove it.

The entire infographic is visible below, but here are a few of its claims: League of Legends has a playerbase of some 32 million players active per month, with 12 million active per day, and an average of 3 million concurrent users at peak hours, compared to the 1.4 million Modern Warfare 3 players on Xbox Live. Riot Games also claims that League of Legends averages over 1 billion play hours, across all players, worldwide, every month.

Such a claim is extremely bold, and may be worth further scrutiny. Most of the exact methodology of how they determined their numbers is not mentioned in the infographic, but a few of the stats are further explained, and some of them stick out as rather curious. For example, the peak concurrent players of the top 100 games on Steam was determined to be 650,000 based on one single day, while the 3 million figure of League of Legends peak concurrent players was apparently determined based on an entire month of data.

On the other hand, Riot Games may very well be correct, and a number of their statistics are much more solid. Either way, you can judge it for yourself; entire infographic is visible below.

Source: Riot Games