Do you want to know how many people play League of Legends?
It was released in 2009. Ten years later, its player base is somewhere around 80 million, and every day, there are around 27 million players inside the game.
This number has stayed steady for years. What keeps players glued to their screens?
And why would anyone bother with a game that has close to one thousand notions that need to be learned before you can understand what you’re looking at any given time?
The Complexity of LoL
League of Legends is a MOBA game that constantly evolves, as the nature of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games (MOBAs) is almost synonymous with gaming complexity. The reason for that is that they combine two genres that have a lot of elements.
The first of these genres is RPG. Role-playing games such as Diablo 2, Skyrim, or Path of Exile are built around heroes that go through a story and complete missions.
As the game progresses and you fight more and more enemies, the quests get harder and the protagonist gets stronger.
You level up, you find better items, your stats, such as strength and intelligence, get enhanced, and your abilities improve.
The second of these genres is RTS. Real-time strategy games involve resource management and the need to defend yourself while simultaneously attacking your enemy.
The goal is to make him capitulate by destroying his army and structures.
The idea here is to grow as fast as possible, gain an edge, and then force battles you can win because of the power advantage you’ve accumulated.
MOBA games are both RPG and RTS games at the same time. They’re centered around teams of heroes who grow in power and fight each other on a given map, in an attempt to destroy the opponent’s base.
And the more heroes and items there are to choose from in the game, the more notions you need to learn. In League of Legends, there are close to 150 heroes (called champions) and around 175 items.
Each of these champions has four abilities that can be leveled up.
The hero itself can grow to become level 18 (max).
When you do the math on these things and then add up all the other elements of the game, you get very close to the number that I was talking about previously: 1,000.
The complexity of LoL is staggering. You might expect young players to dislike it and find it too challenging to learn, but League of Legends keeps people interested for years.
Sooner or later, most of them can look at the screen at any given time and know exactly what they’re looking at and what the possibilities are.
The Joy of Creative Expression
Because it has so many champions and can be played in so many ways, League of Legends gives people a way to express themselves.
In a way, it’s like asking someone to achieve a goal that can be reached in hundreds or even thousands of ways; all of them are challenging, but you get to do things your way. It provides a laboratory for their minds in which to be creative.
The replayability of LoL is virtually infinite. It’s difficult to master any given champion and it’s even more challenging to master any given role.
Each match has 10 different heroes on the same map, so the possibilities are endless.
The Joy of Cooperating with Others
Because we’re social creatures, we’re built to experience joy when cooperating with others towards a positive outcome.
Winning as a result of a team effort feels good. Losing as a result of someone messing up feels bad. And when you play LoL, you’re guaranteed to have both positive and negative experiences. I
n turn, this creates an addiction. You’re constantly trying to avoid the pain of a defeat, while at the same time, you’re motivated to get better in order to win more and have more control over what’s going on. You’re always stimulated and engaged in a group activity.
The question “How many people play League of Legends?” has an answer that might shock some people.
But when you think about how human beings function, anything that resembles a game is guaranteed to be a fun experience.
The better the game and the better you are at it, the better that experience will be.
