Why Pay Attention to League of Legends?

League of Legends is a huge e-sports attraction worldwide.

For anyone who's been paying attention to the e-sports scene for the past five years, this should come as no surprise.  For people who are new to e-sports or have their doubts about e-sports as an industry, here's some numbers to reinforce my statement: in 2015, the World Championship Finals for League of Legends had 14 million people watching at any given point, and 36 million people who watched the series games.  That was just the finals.  The tournament itself drew a global audience of 334 million online viewers over the course of four weeks of matches.

So yeah, e-sports is huge, and League of Legends is the flagship program, so to speak.  Of course, some folks will argue that traditional sports are bigger and pay much better.  Those people are correct, until we start adding up salary numbers for some of the biggest names in League.  While it's true that David Beckham is a multi-millionaire with massive contracts in advertising in addition to his team contract, one of the most financially successful players in North America, Imaqtpie, raked in close to $400,00 in Twitch stream advertising revenue...and that number doesn't include donation money from his viewer base.  Team SoloMid's recently retired top laner, Dyrus, pulled down about $300,000 in Twitch revenue.  Dyrus was a part-time streamer at best during his final year of competitive play, and was earning money from his TSM contract as well.

So why bother paying attention to e-sports, particularly if a person who doesn't enjoy video games or considers video games to be a waste of time, money, and effort?  If the numbers about viewers and advertising revenue earnings for players hasn't convinced you, here's another thing to consider: the market for companies to advertise is incredibly large and mostly untapped save by gaming computer companies, who have a vested interest in this market just by the nature of the market itself.  While most professional teams do have clothing, gaming peripheral, and equipment sponsors, companies like Coca-Cola or Nike have yet to discover e-sports.  From an investment perspective, e-sports bears watching because the entire industry is growing at phenomenal rates, and regional economies will start to be affected by this nascent money machine.

Something else to consider is that League of Legends is a global e-sport, with professional circuits in North America, Europe, China, Korea, Turkey, Brazil, Russia, Latin America, Japan, and Oceania.  The North African region may be the next place to get its own circuit, and this despite the incredible political unrest and turmoil.

So, time to start paying attention, even if you're not a gamer.