The 2018 League of Legends World Finals had nearly 100 million viewers

The League of Legends World Championship 2018 has been over for more than a month now and Riot has just released some of the most impressive statistics from the event.

Headlining Riot’s announcement is the fact that the finals of the tournament, which featured Fnatic facing off with Invictus Gaming, had 99.6 million unique viewers, an impressive increase of almost 20 million viewers over the most watched series of last year’s tournament. The match even featured a concurrent viewer peak of 44 million. For context, this reaches nearly the same highs as the Super Bowl.

While streaming numbers will always be difficult to fully quantify, Riot has stated in the past that part of the reason for the delay on reporting numbers is the company verifying their accuracy and authenticity. One of the reasons for the massive increase in viewership this year is likely due to a Chinese team being in Finals, due to League’s massive popularity in the country.

Also included in the stats this year is the total amount of money for the prize pool that fans helped create for the teams competing at Worlds. This year, the money was raised through sales of the special Championship Kha’Zix skin, and his chromas for each team at the tournament. Through purchasing the skin, fans managed to raise the prize pool by more than $4.2 million adding to the $2.5 million that Riot themselves contributed. With a prize pool of more than $6 million in total, 2018 had the largest prize pool of any League of Legends tournament ever.