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League of Legends and Dota 2 are both massively popular MOBA games , Riot's League of Legends came out in 2009 while Dota 2 was a bit late to the party and they made their appearance in July of 2013. Both Riots League of Legends and Valve's Dota 2 have profited immensely from Icefrogs Dota 1 Warcraft 3 Mod while putting their own unique twists to the genre. To look into which one of these two games sits on the MOBA throne we will take a look at prize money, twitch.tv viewership and monthly/concurrent players at specific moments in time.
Twitch viewers for August 2021
Looking at the popular streaming website twitch.tv in terms of watch hours for August this is how both of the games compare.
League of Legends ranks as the second most viewed game for August on Twitch.tv with 121,487,268 hours watched, which is a huge number for any video game out there. As for Dota 2 it is at #12 with 31,585,756 hours watched so far.
The conclusion, at least in viewership is that League of Legends is 89,901,512 view hours ahead of Dota 2 on the twitch.tv platform. Other notable games: 1st place is occupied by Grand Theft Auto V with 132,149,506 total hours watched.
Twitch.tv viewership for August 2021.
1 Just Chatting 225,879,593 viewer hours
#2 Grand Theft Auto V 132,149,506 viewer hours
#3 League of Legends 121,487,268 viewer hours
#5 Call of Duty: Warzone 60,899,720
Prize Money
As far as prize money goes Dota 2 seems to be heaps and bounds ahead of League of Legends. For example the first Dota International in 2011 which had a grand prize of 1.6m dollars vs League of Legends 2020 World Championship which had a total prize pool of around 2.2m dollars. So looking at this the first invitational and the last League of Legends championship had comparable prize pools but what about the most recent invitational? The latest Dota 2 Invitational has a staggering total prize pool of $34,330,069.00. So how come that more people like to watch League of Legends but Dota 2 has better prize pools? Well since 2013 Valve has allowed the players to contribute to the total prize pool of The International. In 2013 the total prize pool exceeded 2.8m USD and went on to surpass 10 million USD in 2014.
Average Salary
When looking at the average salaries for NA LCS League of Legends players it is speculated that the average salary for a pro player is around 300,000 $ and a handful of times more for the top players. It has also been reported that players like Deft , Rookie and Clid who decide to go to China get to enjoy salaries in the millions.
As far as the average Dota 2 player the average salary seems to be around 130-180k a year which is considerably lower than League of Legends but when you factor in The Invitational it all might very well change. For example look at these Dota 2 players tournament winnings.
1.N0tail Johan Sundstein - $6,983,817.80
2JerAxJesse Vainikka- $6,470,548.78
3.ana - Anathan Pham $- 6,004,411.96
Now looking at the legendary Faker's total career earnings from tournaments they amount to (1.25 million USD) which is about 5-6 times less than the top Dota 2 player tournament earnings.
Also: Would you like to know what kind of Mice , Keyboards and Headphones pro players use? Click here.
Concurrent players
As far as concurrent players are concerned Dota 2 hit it's peak in 2016 with 1.29 million concurrent players online. For the year 2021 Dota 2 has seen quite a decline from it's peak years with 650 thousand concurrent players.
As far as League of Legends is concerned data for 2021 is not available yet but seeing data from 2016 it has had 8 million peak concurrent players at one time and currently boasts 125 million monthly active users compared to the 75 million monthly active users it had in 2016. So it would be a safe bet to say that League of Legends has around 10 times the concurrent peak players than Dota 2 for the year of 2021.
League of Legends is the second most played video game for 2021
League of Legends has been able to keep its top 5 spot in the most played video games for a decade! Currently it ranks as the second most played video game only being second to Fortnite.
League of Legends vs Fortnite
Love it or hate it Fortnite has been Leagues only real competitor for the number one spot in recent years, constantly updating itself with new updates and gimmicks , it's been able to keep its number one spot since its inception. Currently Fortnite boasts the record for most concurrent players at 12.3 million players! While League of Legends is a few million behind with 8.5 million concurrent players.
League Of Legends vs Crossfire
Honestly I've come across Crossfire a couple of times and even played it for a few hours, but I didn't give it much attention, for me it just looked like a worse Counter Strike. But looking at the numbers I was quite surprised to see Crossfire's popularity. Crossfire is a massive game right now especially in Korea. The developer for this company has recently made a deal with Microsoft which will give fruit to a new version of the game as well. It currently boasts 8 million concurrent players.
League of Legends vs Minecraft
Minecraft has been extremely popular every since it came out with an expanding world that you and others create. Although there is not any recent data as far as concurrent players numbers in 2014 Minecraft boasted 1.4m concurrent players and it has grown exponentially since then.
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