Riot Games? League of Legends passed 11.5 million active players, beating out last month?s World of Warcraft players at 10.3 million active players. The free browser based MMORPG has about 1.3 million players online at peak hours, completely eclipsing the brand new Skyrim, which has about 250,000 active players during peak hours.
Riot CEO Brandon Beck gave the fan community credit for the game?s success. ?The incredible passion and dedication of our players is positively inspiring,? he said. ?Our community?s boundless enthusiasm is why they are central to every decision we make at Riot.?
It?s worth noting, of course, that LoL is F2P and unlike World of Warcraft, does not demand player subscriptions. This means that while the two can be compared in terms of raw player numbers, it?s hard to get a bearing on how both games would square of from a financial perspective. One thing?s for sure, League of Legends has proven to be a massive success, and one that the rest of the free MMO market should pay attention to. Time will tell if they can keep their players for as long as Blizzard has kept the WoW crowd, but they?re off to a good start.