Riot Games has spawned an empire from a single game, League of Legends. The free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game has become hugely popular. It had more than 32 million active monthly unique players as of a year ago. That number is wildly out of date, but Riot hasn’t disclosed new numbers. At that time, 12 million players were playing every day, and the more than 5 million players were online at peak times.
Riot Games lobby sign
Whatever the numbers are now, League of Legends is still doing great almost four years after its launch. And Riot Games has grown to more than 800 people in Santa Monica, Calif. The company was named as No. 3 on the list of the best medium-size places to work for in 2013, based on the Great Place to Work evaluation service.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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