League of Legends draws 8 million concurrent players, making it the most popular game on PC

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This year is League of Legends 10th anniversary, and Riot has a big celebration planned.

(Image credit: Riot Games)

League of Legends is turning 10 this fall, and to celebrate Riot Games has a special event planned on October 15 that will include a livestreamed look at the past, present, and future of LoL—including teases of 2020's preseason changes and Teamfight Tactics next big update.

Oh, and developer Riot Games also announced in a press release that League of Legends sees about 8 million peak concurrent players logging in everyday—which probably makes League the most popular game in the world (not like that should surprise anyone). But it is bigger than the top ten games on Steam put together.

I say "probably" here because there is some competition. As I wrote about yesterday, one of the biggest games in Asia is Crossfire, a Counter-Strike clone on steroids that boasts a whopping 660 million registered accounts and, according to developer Smilegate, also 8 million peak concurrent players. So it's not exactly clear who actually wins The Most Popular PC Game award.

Still, it's crazy that a 10-year-old game like League of Legends is so damn popular. If you're excited to learn about what's next, tune in to League of Legends' Twitch page on October 15. Though the stream will likely be active all day, at 6 pm PST Riot will be hosting a special anniversary edition livestream of their Riot Pls vlogs, which will act as the main presentation for the event.

Update: This article's headline originally stated League of Legends sees 8 million total players daily, but that's actually 8 million concurrent players at one time. The daily total is far higher. We've changed the headline to reflect that.

Steven Messner
Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.