Riot Games’ big annual World Championships Series League of Legends tournament wrapped up in October, and now the studio has published an infographic highlighting some of the numbers it put up this year.
Most notably, Riot says the total prize pool for this year’s WCS hit $6.7 million, which is significantly more than the $2.3 million in prizes awarded during last year’s WCS.
This is due entirely to Riot funneling a portion of proceeds from sales of special in-game skins and other cosmetic items into the pot — Riot itself contributed just $2.1 million to the prize pool. This was one of many ways the company said it would try to increase players’ earnings after some complained earlier this year that Riot was shortchanging pro League players on the revenue front.
In doing so Riot seems to have taken a page from Valve’s playbook; the Dota 2 developer has used a cut of proceeds from in-game items to consistently generate the largest prize pools in eSports for its annual Dota 2 championships.
You can find a few more interesting bits of data, including the number of in-game dragons slain (300!) and the number of trucks required to haul WCS around (31!), over on Riot’s League eSports blog.