242.8M Viewers on K/DA POP/STARS -- 2018 League of Legends Events by Numbers

Dec 11, 2018

Riot Games has posted a recap in numbers of the 2018 season of League of Legends.

The 2018 season has come to an end with Invictus Gaming reigning as the World Champion. At the 2018 World Championship, 14 leagues around the world competed, with 24 teams qualified. A total of 144 players from 30+ countries participated in the event.

In addition to the $2.25M prize pool from Riot, dedicated fans contributed more than $4.2M for the teams that reached the World Championship.

The finals of the 2018 World Championship had 99.6 million unique viewers with 44 million concurrent viewers at peak. It was broadcast in 19 different languages across more than 30 different platforms and television channels. Riot also featured a new stat to this year's numbers: average minute audience during the finals. This figure represents the estimated audience size during any given minute of a broadcast and is used by major sports around the world when reporting their viewership.

As for the presence of the champions at Worlds, Aatrox, Urgot, and Alistar were the highest, being picked or banned 99.2%, 96.6%, 95% of the games, respectively. Individual champions that had the highest win rate were LeBlanc, Sivir, and Ornn, followed close by Taliyah, Irelia, and Azir.

For Worlds, Riot featured two musical anthems: RISE! and POP/STARS. Both accumulated more than 180M listens on YouTube and hit #1 on multiple charts from Billboard, Google, and iTunes. Especially, POP/STARS by K/DA which used augmented reality drew more than 242.8 million video and music streams, still rising.

Riot included stats for not only Worlds, but the 2018 Mid Season Invitational as well. In the competition held in May, LPL team Royal Never Give Up raised the trophy in their victory against Kingzone DragonX. Riot introduced the viewership stats for the event as well, with 60M unique viewers for the finals, 11M average concurrent viewers for the finals, and 19.8M concurrent viewers at peak.

The second overall Rift Rivals featured five separate tournaments around the world. A total of 42 teams participated in 93 games played.

The 2018 season concluded in the All-Star Event at Las Vegas which invited 40 players around the world, with 33 pro players competing. The event was more of a 'for fun' event than the previous years, having invited many content creators and popular community members to the event.