League of Legends Season 2 Championships most watched eSports event of all time

This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

Riot has released numbers for the recent League of Legends Season 2 World Championships which took place last week at the Galen Center Arena at the University of South California. Riot is reporting that at peak, over 1,154,000 unique people watched the event online, not counting TV numbers. More than 8,282,000 unique viewers tuned in total via online and TV combined, with 2,402,225 people watching through Korean and Chinese TV.

Over the course of both the World Playoffs and Finals, people watched 24,230,688 hours of League of Legends. These numbers make the Riot Season 2 World Championships the most watched competitive gaming eSports event of all time, according to the company.

With the rise of watching games through streaming services such as Twitch.TV and Own3d.TV, this record has been broken several times in the past year. Two months ago, the bar was set by Valve's The International Dota 2 tournament, taking in 567,000 concurrent viewers, half from China. In June, Major League Gaming brought in 437,000 concurrent viewers and 4.7 million unique viewers for the Spring Championships. Riot has now shattered those previous records.

“It was obviously an honor to be asked to commentate the Season 2 World Final, the viewing figures are amazing”, Leigh “Deman” Smith, broadcaster for the Season 2 Championships, told GameSpot. “To think that we were being watched by similar amounts of people as a major sport gets legitimizes what we in eSports have been driving for the last 10 years plus to achieve. It was truly a great moment in eSports history I can say I was a part of.”

The Taipei Assassins won $1 million by defeating Korea's Azubu Frost in the Grand Finals.

Photo Credit: Riot Games / lolesports.com