League of Legends is big, so big that its player base amounts to more than one percent of the global population.
In the recent story on Polygon, in the website’s long-form feature series, Riot Games confirmed the current League of Legends player pool is more 100 million.
League of Legends is a Massive Online Battle Arena (MOBA) where teams of five players choose heroes and to control parts of a map. It requires teamwork, strategy, and a lot of quick calculations. It is not the easiest game to jump into, but that has not deterred it from becoming one of the biggest online games in the world.
Many assumed Riot’s silence these past few years on its amount of users was because the game had been in decline. In 2014, Riot said it had 67 million monthly players with 27 million playing daily. Rumors of its decline were clearly exaggerated.
Riot’s Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck discussed their displeasure when talking about numbers. “It’s hard to parse, but at the end of the day, those things don’t even feel real,” Beck said. “The coolest thing is actually when we’re at the live events and get to meet fans face to face. Only then does it start to feel real. Otherwise, they’re just numbers on a screen all over the world.”
While the game has been a monumental success, some fans have not been happy with the way the company communicates with players, professionals, and sponsors. League of Legends is also one of the most popular e-sports in the world. Unlike traditional sports, e-sports can change dramatically due to a balance update. The most recent patch riled the community and led to a PR disaster for Riot. Team SoloMid, one of the most popular League of Legends teams, was at odds with the developer as well.
Merrill eventually did backtrack and attempt to rectify the issue. Either way, the game’s numbers continue to impress.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.