Location | Rotating locations |
---|---|
Month played | October |
Established | 2011 |
Number of tournaments | 6 |
Administrator(s) | Riot Games |
Format |
Round-robin (group stage) Single-elimination (bracket stage) |
Teams | 8 (2011), 12 (2012), 14 (2013), 16 (2014–) |
Website | Official website |
SK Telecom T1 |
The League of Legends World Championship is the annual professional League of Legends world championship tournament hosted by Riot Games and is the culmination of each season. The first World Championship was held in 2011 at DreamHack Winter 2011 and was won by Fnatic. Teams compete for the champion title, the 70 pounds (32 kg) Summoner's Cup, and a US$1,000,000 champion prize. In 2016, the finals were watched by 43 million people, with a peak concurrent viewership of 14.7 million viewers, breaking 2015's finals' viewer records. The total cumulative daily unique impressions (the amount of unique viewers that tuned in every day via online and television channels) reached 396 million.
LA 2024, which is overseeing the Los Angeles bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics was inspired by the success of 2016 League of Legends World Championship and is considering to plan and include eSports in the Olympics games if they win the bid. Casey Wasserman, the chairman of LA 2024, suggested using technology used in certain segments of League of Legends Worlds such as augmented reality and virtual reality to make the Olympics more accessible to a younger demographic.
Riot Games, which owns League of Legends, commissioned the winner's trophy known as the Summoner’s Cup. Riot specified that it should weigh 70 pounds, though the actual weight of the finished cup was reduced so it would not be too heavy to lift in victory. Silversmith Thomas Lyte, having already created the Season Two World Championship Cup in 2012, crafted the winners' trophy for the 2014 games.
The Season 1 Championship in June 2011, held at Dreamhack Summer 2011 in Sweden, featured a US$100,000 tournament prize pool. 8 teams from North America, Southeast Asia and Europe participated in the championship. Over 1.6 million viewers watched the streaming broadcast of the event, with a peak of over 210,000 simultaneous viewers in the final matches.
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