League of legends professional#

The tournaments function as marketing to bring in new players and to inspire loyalty in regulars, says Marc Merrill, a Riot Games co-founder and the company president. Yet despite ticket prices of $15 to $50 for seats at league events, the league itself is a money loser. Today, according to SuperData, a market research firm, League of Legends has more than eight times the number of active players as Dota 2, its closest rival in the genre known as multiplayer online battle arena.

League of legends professional#

The company also keeps a few hundred professional players on salary, ensuring that they can spend up to 14 hours a day practicing, the time required to compete at the highest level. It runs tournaments worldwide, with its own slick broadcasting operation streaming to various Internet video sites, complete with color commentators and highlight reels - a kind of ESPN for gamers. Riot controls every aspect of the professional league, right down to the music composed for live events. Though e-sports were around for about a decade before Riot Games was born, no company has jumped in with the same intensity. In the case of League of Legends, players work a keyboard and a mouse, wielding exotic weapons in a virtual forest of turrets and torches, apparently landscaped by refugees of “Lord of the Rings.” The standard match is a mercilessly kinetic and bewilderingly complex battle between two teams of five players each team tries to destroy the other’s nexus, a gaudy purple structure that glows like a mood ring. But all the action in e-sports occurs online, and the contestants hardly move. If you are not a male between the ages of 15 and 25, a group that Riot says accounts for 90 percent of all LoL players, the odds are good that you have never heard of e-sports, a catchall term for games that resemble conventional sports insofar as they have superstars, playoffs, fans, uniforms, comebacks and upsets. In the process, it has become an e-sport. Since its debut in 2009, League of Legends has evolved from a small population of desktop-computer warriors into a full-scale phenomenon. That’s an audience larger than the one that tuned in to the last game of the N.B.A. Last year, Riot Games says, 32 million people around the world saw a South Korean team win the Summoner’s Cup, along with a grand prize of $1 million, in the Staples Center in Los Angeles. 19, the finals will be held in a stadium built for soccer’s World Cup, with 40,000 fans expected and many times that number watching online. Still not enough.”ĭozens of those players are now in Seoul, at the fourth world championship. “We thought we’d be able to send it back to Thomas Lyte” - the British company that fabricated it - “and they shaved like five pounds off. He was sitting in the company’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., and talking about what is officially known as the Summoner’s Cup, an oversize silver-plated chalice that looks like a faintly sinister “Game of Thrones” prop.

“It takes five people to hoist it,” said Dustin Beck, a vice president at Riot Games. Seventy pounds is roughly twice as heavy as hockey’s Stanley Cup, and hockey players, if we can generalize for a moment, tend to be brawnier than gamers. While there are many correct answers, it turns out that “about 70 pounds” isn’t one of them. But nobody at Riot Games, which owns League of Legends, focused on a pretty basic question: How much should the trophy weigh? A trophy should be grand and gleaming - that much seemed obvious. When the company behind one of the world’s most popular video games, League of Legends, started organizing tournaments - noisy events where professional players compete under huge screens in arenas packed with fans - it had to design a championship trophy.