League of Legends is unsurprisingly still a revenue-generating machine for Riot Games. The massively popular MOBA brought in around $1.75 billion in revenue in 2020, according to intelligence firm SuperData.
Amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, League was reportedly the highest-earning, non-mobile free-to-play title over the last year and the sixth highest-earning FTP title overall.
Riot’s expansion into other gaming genres with Legends of Runeterra and VALORANT didn’t impact the success of League. In fact, the game grew its revenue to $1.75 billion, up from $1.5 billion in 2019.
Tencent’s Honor of Kings and Peacekeeper Elite topped the FTP revenue list, bringing in $2.45 and $2.32 billion respectively. In total, the FTP market increased by nine percent to gross $98.4 billion in 2020, while games media as a whole earned $139.9 billion, up from $120.1 billion in 2019.
The entire games industry grew 12 percent year-over-year from 2019, with North America and Europe seeing significant growth in both the number of people playing games and spending money on their chosen titles. Meanwhile, FTP games continued to dominate, generating 78 percent of the industry’s revenue and accounting for nearly 60 percent of the Asian market’s total earnings—equating to more than $2 billion.
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