Months after the FIFA World Cup in Brazil ends, another World Cup venue will host a very different kind of competition: a championship battle between players of one of the world’s most popular online games.
On Oct. 19, at Sangam Stadium in Seoul, South Korea — a site of the 2002 World Cup — two teams of five people will compete for victory in League of Legends, an online multiplayer battle game for PCs. The winning team will claim a $1 million prize.
The winners will also walk away with a trophy, the Summoner’s Cup, that looks as if it came from an episode of “Game of Thrones.”
Sangam Stadium seats about 66,000 people. Riot Games, the company that publishes League of Legends and puts on the event, expects 40,000 to 50,000 people to show up to see the competition, Dustin Beck, Riot’s vice president for e-sports and merchandise, said in an interview.
If that seems like an eye-popping audience for an event like this, consider that there are about 67 million people playing League of Legends every month, a bit more than the total population of France.
At last year’s League of Legends championship match in Los Angeles, more than 12,000 people filled the sold-out event at the Staples Center. The centerpiece of the event was a gigantic screen, onto which all of the virtual competition was projected. Another 32 million fans watched the final online, according to Riot.
The huge audiences for these events are a further illustration of the rise of video games as spectator sports. (The field is called e-sports.) A professional game league, Major League Gaming, packed more than 20,000 fans into a convention center in Anaheim, Calif., last year for its finals. More than 45 million people a month watch Twitch, a social network for broadcasting games over the Internet.
League of Legends has proved to be especially well suited to live competitions. It’s a team-based game that requires a lot of cooperation among players to win. And if you’re a devotee of online games, it’s very exciting to watch.
“We knew it was going to be fun to play, but we didn’t know how fun it would be as a spectator sport,” Mr. Beck said.
The huge turnout expected for the finals of the game in South Korea is not all that shocking, given the privileged status of online gaming and e-sports in Asia. South Korea and China are huge markets for the game. Riot Games is majority owned by Tencent, the big Chinese Internet company, though it was started in Southern California.
Last year’s winner of the Summoner’s Cup, SK Telecom T1, was from South Korea.
“It’s in the mecca where e-sports thrives,” Mr. Beck said.