LEAGUE OF LEGENDS

Over the last few decades, mobile games and digital arcade entertainment have become increasingly prevalent among the gaming population and League of Legends (LoL), Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game, is one of, if not the most, popular one out of the pool. Developed and released by an American game developer, Riot Games, in 2009, League of Legends is a free-to-play, five-versus-five online battle simulation rooted in fantasy and a dystopian universe. The game was initially a Windows platform exclusive, before expanding onto macOS in 2013 and then onto smartphones in late 2020 in the form of League of Legends: Wild Rift (Palshikar, 2024).

As of January 2025, the game has recorded almost 131 million players monthly. However, the active monthly player count hit its peak in 2022, amounting to almost 200 million (Gill, 2025).

During the two decades of LoL’s run, the game or the product itself, has undergone many changes, adaptations, and tweaks. This essay will take a close look at how the aforementioned has taken place, its effect on the audience, and will delve lightly into the future prognosis of the game.

TARGET AUDIENCE

As per leagueoflegends.com (2025), the official platform for the game, the target audience and the age rating is players over the age of 12. As the game is based in fantasy and action, 12-year-old children are most likely to be attracted to the colourful and action-packed gameplay that LoL has to offer. However, Gill (2025), upon analysis of the player count, suggests that the actual audience are individuals between the ages of 21-24, with the age range constituting 37% of the player pool. 17–20-year-olds follow close behind at 27%. This data affirms that the main consumers of LoL are young adults.

Another demographic to consider under target audiences is gender. The game itself has almost 140 avatars, or champions, that one can equip, with almost half of them being female avatars. Therefore, it can be theorized that the developers, Riot Games, intended on the target audience to be of mixed gender types. Yet, studies show that League is very much male-dominated, despite it being proven that the rate of skill accruing and efficiency in gameplay is “negligible” between males and females. Furthermore, women that do engage in the game demonstrate “less confidence in their ability to kill opponents” in comparison to their male counterparts, do not use the in-chat functions or engage in live communication with the team, and only participate in the game alongside a male companion and almost never individually (Ratan et al., 2015).

LoL, when released in 2009, was intended to compete with a then-popular MOBA game – DotA (Defense of the Ancients) – and was crafted with inspiration from DotA. Donaldson (2015) analyses the expertise required, or preferred, for LoL, reporting that many players have “mechanical expertise” which is experience with in-game interface and play commands and which is carried over from previous experiences in MOBA, such as DotA. Therefore, many of LoL players are also players of DotA, which can be what the developers intended – to seize existent fans of MOBA games like DotA.

CHANGES IN LEAGUE AND ITS AUDIENCE

The most basic changes that a game can undergo are called ‘patches’, which are regular and consistently spaced updates to the gameplay, interface, characters, and any bugs in the system. For LoL, these patches come in the form of “buffing” – the increase in character ability - or “nerfing” – the diminishing of avatar skills, and over the years, these have been consistently updated based on players’ use of certain avatars, or the lack thereof, and other such reviews by the consumers. This, Dubois and Chalk (2024) say, is a model of business-driven games called “games as a service (GaaS)”. League had started off with only 40 available avatars in 2009, but now it boasts over 140 champions. According to Dubois and Chalk (2024), this is the method in which “businesses in the competitive industry of gaming” retain players and ensure a long-running campaign, despite their release being dated many years ago.

On the other hand, LoL has not only changed within the game itself, but it also has moulded itself into other forms of media content. One of the most popular adapted forms is Arcane, a Netflix series that is produced by Riot Games and is based on the lore of the League, complete with its setting and its most important characters taking centre stage. Many discovered the game through Arcane which was released in November 2021, the series working as a very successful marketing ploy by Riot and establishing itself as a standalone “transmedia text”. Engagement with the game increased in the following year of 2022 to hit its peak at 151 million players monthly. While it is true that Arcane attracted novel players to LoL, studies show that Arcane prompted more retention than attraction of audience in relation to the game itself, with those new to the universe interacting mostly with content associated with only the series and less the game, and existent players connecting better with the characters and delving deeper into the dystopian universe of League (Dudkina and Madrona, 2023).

Arcane, however, has a separate age demographic as well. The TV series deals with a lot of graphic content like violence, gore, blood, sex, nudity, homosexuality, mental illnesses, drug use, foul language, and death. Due to its broadcasting platform, Netflix, and the distinction of age-restrictions on broadcast media in different regions, the mean age rating is 15+ (IMDb, 2022). This means that the game is available to a younger audience, but the series is targeted toward older audiences that have experience with similar gory content or with the original product itself.

Riot Games has indulged heavily into cross-media adaptations for LoL and have even produced exclusive music for the game and the series, often collaborating with famous personas in the music industries across the world (Ashekandi, 2019) for approximately 15 years. K/DA is one such collaboration, a virtual girl group based in the League universe but voiced by renowned voices of the Korean, American, and Chinese music industry. These types of collaborations have attracted many international players to engage in LoL. In their 2023 Annual Report, Riot Games detailed their expansions into the Southeast Asian gaming crowd through such creations and the introduction of fan-led cosplay events with celebrity guest appearances to boost advertising. Due to these efforts, League is now incredibly popular not only in U.S.A anymore, but also in Europe, and Southeast Asia, particularly South Korea and China (Xu, 2025).

The worldwide popularity of League has led to the introduction of The League of Legends World Championship, a macro-scale e-sports event with teams of 5 from participating to compete against each other in LoL. The championship is the most profitable and popular product of the League series, with over 60 million viewers. The players competing within the championship, especially the winners reap monetary benefits from it, for example Faker, a renowned LoL player and championship contender, was reported to earn almost $3 million per annum through streaming and additional cash prizes from tournaments and leagues of the Lol series (Steinkuehler, 2019).

League has also been introduced into the Asian Games under the e-sports banner alongside other MOBA games and is now treated sincerely and on the same level as a traditional sport.


MARKETING AND ADVERTISING

The above mentioned cross-platform spins on the original game are highly successful in terms of marketing. Regardless of their success, the game is marketed in other platforms as well, the most utilised one being Twitch, a live streaming platform used to broadcast video gameplays, e-sport leagues, and casual talk programmes. Matsui, Sapienza, and Ferrara (2019) found that when players streamed their games, they engaged with the game longer and played more often, in-game chats and communications also increased viewership and expanded streaming channels, and this consequently affected the widespread engagement with the content, whether as a streamer or a viewer.

League of Legends has a massive audience on Twitch – it is the second most popular topic and has an average of 1,000 channels that stream its gameplay, with over 23 million hours of viewership (Tracker, 2025).
Digital marketing of the game is also prevalent on Twitter, whether it be to push audience to play the game or watch the e-sports tournament, and this is aided by the fact that Twitter is a primary source of digital engagement in various regions (Lord, 2023).

Research and interviews of active players shows that the main marketing strategy that is prevalent is “word of mouth”. Existent players spread the word about LoL and this is boosted through the Twitch platform, where one player can reach a mass of viewers at once. (Liu, Ma, and Wang, 2022).

While the game is free-to-play for everyone, there are some features that are paid within the game – the customization of skins and appearances. This is how Riot monetizes and profits through the game. Of course, it is not mandatory for a player to purchase skin, yet the availability of customization incites players to spend on glamming their avatars up, even if these paid changes do not affect the overall ability or power of the champion. Many still claim that the fancier customizations of avatars can distract enemies, inevitable affecting the win-rate. Despite this, the monetization of this part of the game also attracts players as they become curious about the availabilities and patched offered each quarter by the developers, also providing a sense of belonging, subjectivity, and identification of the player with the chosen avatar, thus increasing engagement (Böffel et al., 2022).


PROBLEMS IN LoL

Aggression, toxicity, and negativity is the central issue with the League. Due to the open feature of live in-game chatting and communication, the opportunity to trash-talk, “flame” (dominate another by force), “troll” (verbally insult or mock another) and “doxx” (using sensitive information against one) another player arises, and this is often exploited based on the violent themes that the game is driven by. The game being team-based also opens avenues of such toxic behaviour. The developers have attempted to patch in a moderation code and other supervision systems, yet the game continues to house such anti-social interactions (Lee, Jeong, and Jeon, 2019).

Another issue is as highlighted above and that is the lack of a female demographic within the LoL player community despite there being a plethora of female avatars. A study by Ratan et al. (2019) portrays that these female characters are mostly chosen by men as they male players mainly focus on skill sets of the champion rather than the gender itself while the female players always choose a female champion and never a male avatar as an obligation to identify with their gender. Women do not pick a male avatar even if the said avatar has a much more efficient battle approach.

The director of League of Legends, Pu Liu, identified another flaw in the product – the stagnant player base. The players currently active are mostly older players that have aged with the game and new players are fewer. This can be attributed to the emergence of many similar games that have taken over the industry – Overwatch, Fortnite, Roblox, etc (Litchfield, 2024).

FUTURE OF LoL

Many propose that the future of League is bright as their consistent patches, introduction of new champions through constant supervision of audience satisfaction and player experience, and their investment into transmedia productions provide a solid basis for them to successfully adapt to the ever-changing gaming landscape, even in the face of solid competition from other MOBA games (Project, 2024).

However, as the analysis detailed in the essay shows, Riot and League must address some issues hindering their growth. The main suggestion that would push for the reaping of newer, younger players is the expansion of the lore and offering alternate maps and gaming modes for beginner player. Navigating a pre-existent map that has many skilled players already exceling in it can scare newer players from seriously engaging in the gameplay. Another option to revamp is the promotion of female LoL players. Riot should take a bigger initiative in pushing women to the front of the gaming scene to reassure potentially interested women to also engage in the game, using the incentives of player customization and displaying the wide catalogue of female powers in the champions list.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

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