If the sale of Riot wasn't testament enough to the success of League of Legends, today the developer released some very interesting stats about their game. To date, there have been 15 million registered players, and on average ten games of League of Legends begin every second. According to Riot, over one million games of LoL are played every day, with 1.4 million players logging daily to spend 3.7 million cumulative hours. Every day.
We spoke to CEO Brandon Beck to find out a little more about those figures, and what's in store for both League of Legends and Riot.
IGN: How is the player base distributed?
Beck: Currently, League of Legends is launched in North America and Europe. The player base is pretty evenly distributed between the two continents.
IGN: Do registered users include dummy accounts and accounts that have gone unused for 3+ months?
Beck: Our 15 million registered users include all accounts created to-date. We believe the vast majority of these are unique accounts.
IGN: Almost 10% of your registered users play every day. That seems very high, given the style of game. What do you attribute that high number to?
Beck: We believe it comes from having a game that is fun to pick up and highly replayable. We are relentlessly focused on listening to our players and constantly evolving our experience. I think it's our commitment to ongoing feature and content development, gameplay polish, and general improvement has also fueled player engagement. And we recognize that we're far from done – our players could point to a laundry list of improvements that they desperately want to see so we remain hard at work.
IGN: How is the average daily playtime split up? How much of the userbase plays the game for, say, 3+ hours a day? How much for 5+ hours etc…?
Beck: It's all over the map as you might imagine. Some people are pretty disciplined about playing one or two games a day for a fairly bite-sized experience. Other players tend to play for long streaks which can add up to an MMO-like play pattern. I can relate to both as I tend to pendulum back and forth.
IGN: What has the rate of growth in the playerbase been like in the last 6 months? Has there been a rapid acceleration/deceleration?
Beck: Fortunately, we have seen steady growth since launch, and that growth has been fueled principally by word of mouth – friends bring their friends to the game, they bring in their friends, and so on. Our growth is steady but accelerating, and we owe that to our community sharing League of Legends with their friends.
IGN: In the last months, heavy-use days like patch days have been consistently marred by server troubles. Has this instability visibly affected whether players return? How do you plan to balance the continued growth of your playerbase against servers that are already beginning to buckle under the strain?
Beck: This is a very hot topic for us. Almost nothing is more painful for us than when there is a hiccup in the live experience affecting our players. Server stability is one of our key priorities and quickly became an important issue for us as our growth way exceeded expectations. We are all over this and working diligently to continue to improve and bullet-proof the experience as we grow.
IGN: As the game gets more complex every two weeks, how do you plan to maintain player-growth without alienating new player with the burden of learning 70+ characters?
Beck: This has been one of the age-old questions for this genre. It is important to gradually familiarize new players with characters versus throw the kitchen sink at them. Part of the logic with our champion rotation was to help new players get comfortable with a specific batch of champions. There are some additional ideas we are playing with as well.
IGN: With several similar games already out and more on the horizon, how do you plan to maintain League of Legends as the MOBA of choice? How do you plan to differentiate it from the competition?
Beck: The MOBA genre is ripe for a lot of continued innovation. Our focus has been to really push the envelope on creativity in gameplay, character design, and competitive features, but we believe we've only just scratched the surface of what's possible in the genre. In that vein, we are looking for to making some exciting announcements very soon.
IGN: What is on the horizon for League of Legends? What is on the horizon for Riot? Do you ever plan to develop a new property, separate from LoL or do you foresee Riot indefinitely being "the League of Legends guys"?
Beck: For League of Legends, we have a lot of very cool things in store for the future. We are still very much in development (in fact we have a lot more developers now than when we launched) and there are some very substantive new features, content, and improvements in progress that might surprise you.
As for Riot, we're just getting started. Don't expect us to turn into a game factory, but you can expect a very focused and uncompromising approach to further high quality, innovative, online experiences.
