League of Legends sports a very unique demographic compared to most competitive games. The original launch was in 2009, with the earliest wave of players now well into their late 20s and early 30s.
The average player is around 22-23, but has also been playing the game for around 6-10 years. Most players who still play today started playing at around 2014-2015, and have periodically returned to the game over the years. It is incredibly unique for such a popular game to have such a long-lasting veteran playerbase. The average League of Legends player is more likely to be a veteran than players of games like OSRS and World of Warcraft.
Player age affects how Riot designs the game, how esports teams manage rosters, and how sponsors and advertisers approach their campaigns. In a Reddit thread from 2024, Gen.G CEO Arnold Hur stated that people working in the space are starting to take aging more seriously.
More of the player base is now older, and their habits, availability, and preferences differ from those of high school or college students.
The change in the average player's age over time not only reflects an awkwardly weighted distribution, but also a larger trend in gaming—long-term retention.
Riot has uniquely managed to keep most of its player engaged across seasons, patches and hard meta shifts. Your average player in 2025 is likely to have been playing for a long time, which means they react differently to new patches compared to a playerbase which is relatively "newer" to their game, such as Fortnite or PUBG.
This fact pins both DotA2 and League of Legends as unique games with VERY unique demographics. It is, however, this very fact that makes attracting new players quite a bit harder.
According to a 2023 survey on Reddit with over 10,000 participants, the average League of Legends player is around 22.
The most common age range for League of Legends players falls between 20 and 24 years old. The next largest group is 25 to 29, followed closely by 16 to 19. Smaller portions of the player base exist above 30 or below 15.
There are outliers in both directions. Some users report playing regularly well into their 40s or even 50s, particularly if they started during League’s early seasons. On the other end, while the official age requirement for creating a Riot account is 13, it's not uncommon for players between 10 and 12 to lie about their age to play casually.
Most League players fall into one of three primary age groups: teens (13–19), young adults (20–29), and older adults (30+). The largest single block is the 20–24 segment, which contains both longtime players who started in their teens and newer users who joined after high school. The 25–29 group follows closely behind, particularly users who were early adopters during Seasons 1 through 4. Collectively, the 20–29 range makes up more than half of the global user base.
The teenage segment remains active but has shrunk in proportion. League's complexity and lack of a good tutorial is partly to blame. There's also the issue that your average "bad" player in League is still miles ahead of any actual new player.
Most younger teens entering multiplayer games today tend to start with more accessible options like Fortnite, Minecraft, or mobile games. These titles offer easier onboarding, faster gratification, and more social integration through features like in-game voice chat or cross-platform progression.
Regional differences also influence the demographic curve. In South Korea and China, where internet cafés and school-age play are more culturally normalized, the average age tends to skew slightly younger. In Europe and North America, the opposite is true. Many players from these regions began in high school or university and have continued into adult life.
League of Legends launched in 2009 with a young, largely student-based audience. Early players were often in high school or university, and many of them joined through word-of-mouth.
League of Legends was a game with low system requirements, free to play access, and relatively shorter game times. It appealed to teenagers who quickly got competitive with the game over the years.
Many longtime players say they experience a sort of "cycle" with League, where they come back to the game every few months or years at a consistent rate.
This created a situation where League aged alongside its community. Instead of seeing rapid turnover as players left and new ones entered, the game developed a persistent core of long-term users. These long-term users carried with them nearly a decade of meta knowledge, which meant the meta had to accommodate for a playerbase that could find and abuse even the smallest chink in the patch notes.
In turn, this situation turns into a bit of an Ouroboros—by appealing to veteran players, Riot fails to capture new players, turning the fanbase deeper into an older-aged skew.
It remains to be seen what will happen when these veteran players move on to greener pastures, or simply get too old for most of them to keep gaming as a longterm priority.
However, Riot Games has already noticed this issue, choosing to address it with the release of Wild Rift, a mobile and "updated" version of League of Legends made to recapture a younger audience, which it has been able to do successfully.
League of Legends shares its space with several other long-running competitive games, each with its own age distribution.
DotA 2 has a similarly aging community. Like League, it is a mechanically demanding, knowledge-heavy MOBA with very minimal onboarding. New players entering Dota often face an overwhelming array of systems and slang, and pacing that allows very little room for mistakes. Most Dota players active in 2025 began in the early 2010s or earlier, and community surveys suggest an average age in the mid-to-late twenties. Dota’s esports scene also reflects this, with many professional players peaking around 23–26 and retiring shortly after.
Counter-Strike operates under a different model. The average CS:GO player tends to skew younger than the average League player, with a strong representation of users in the 16–24 range.
CS’s simplicity in rules and onboarding allows new users to understand the basics within minutes, which supports a continuous influx of younger players. Professional CS:GO players often debut earlier than their League counterparts and cycle through teams more rapidly.
Valorant offers a hybrid case. It combines the FPS core of CS:GO with ability-based play inspired by MOBAs. Because it is newer and actively marketed toward a younger demographic, its player base trends younger than League’s.
At the same time, Riot’s development model for Valorant has benefitted from the lessons of League: it features an actual tutorial, higher accessibility, and more active outreach to content creators. The average Valorant player is estimated to be in their late teens to early twenties, with many current esports players under 21.
Overwatch saw an initial boom among players aged 16–24 in 2016–2018. That group has now aged into their twenties, and many have either continued playing Overwatch 2 or shifted to other live service titles. Like League, Overwatch has struggled to capture new younger audiences in recent years due to increased competition from newer, faster-paced shooters. It faces many of the same difficulties League faces.
Games that are complex, longstanding, or require external educational resources tend to age alongside their communities. Games that offer immediate feedback, low information thresholds, or simplified onboarding tend to attract and retain younger users more easily.
League falls, always has fallen, into the first category. Its complexity matched with a quicker matches is what Riot initially used to set the game apart from the competition in the early and mid 2010s. However, this same business model is what it may some day lead to the game's downfall.
League of Legends' main challenge today is to try and capture new players, without sacrificing its depth, and its veteran playerbase with it.
The average age of League of Legends players has implications across nearly every part of the ecosystem: gameplay design, esports recruitment, community content, and Riot’s broader development strategy.
As the core player base continues to age, long-term retention will become more important than early acquisition. Older players tend to have less free time and lower tolerance for frustration. This places pressure on Riot to refine the user experience in ways that reduce burnout without flattening the game’s complexity.
These changes are already visible in subtle adjustments, such as improved remake systems, slightly shorter game lengths, and more transparent patch previews. Features like Quick Play are also being adapted to serve players who want low-commitment matches that still feel structured and meaningful. The recent adoption of consistent, seasonal gamemodes such as Arena further serve to recapture an older, veteran audience that has increasingly less time to spend on League.
In esports, the age curve affects team development and competitive pacing. Fewer teenage prodigies are entering the scene, and the talent pool increasingly draws from veteran solo queue players in their twenties. This shifts the focus of scouting and coaching away from raw mechanics and toward decision-making, communication, and role consistency. Teams that adapt to this demographic change are more likely to maintain performance across split cycles. It also encourages longer career paths, where players transition into analysis, content creation, or coaching rather than retire from the scene altogether.
The modern League of Legends esports player doesn't often use their revenue to get a college education or re-specialize into something more long-term. They are far more likely to become entrepreneurs, or to simply reinvest into what already works. This also means that it is more likely we'll start seeing older and older players in competitive, compared to other games.
On the business side, an older player base changes how Riot and its partners approach monetization and marketing. Adults are more likely to make in-game purchases and participate in premium events, but they are also more selective. Riot has responded with more exclusive cosmetics, narrative-driven content like Arcane, and hybrid products such as physical merch and in-game bundles. Partnerships now target long-term engagement rather than novelty, with tie-ins that emphasize style, identity, or nostalgia over trend-based hype.
For future growth, Riot will likely need to balance two separate strategies: retention and onboarding.
Retention relies on preserving the systems and features that long-term players already value, such as mechanical mastery, champion depth, and competitive integrity.
Onboarding, on the other hand, requires structural simplification: better tutorials, clearer match objectives, and user flows that make first-time players feel equipped rather than overwhelmed.
The PC version of League may never return to the explosive youth growth it saw in 2013 or 2015. But with better onboarding systems and broader support, it can maintain a healthy and dedicated core of players for many years down the line.
