32 million people watched the League of Legends finals

If there's still any doubt that Esports isn't a modern cultural phenomenon that isn't going anywhere, just look at the numbers Riot is quoting for its recent Season 3 World Championships. According to the developer, as many as 32 million people watched it online and that's on top of the 20,000 + fans that were watching live in a packed out Staples Centre.

To put that into context, Riot compared these figures to those from previous seasons of League finals. In season 2, there were a total of 8.2 million people watching at home, with just over 1.1 million concurrently viewing at any one time. In a year, Riot quadrupled its online viewer numbers. That's an insane growth spurt for the sport.

You'd normally only be able to excite this many nerds, if you announced an adult based Pokemon RPG.

But of course Riot isn't resting on its laurels, it has big plans for the new season of League of Legends which is starting very soon. New game features and tweaks to the map itself, like the introduction of new creep camps and a few big changes to the size and shape of major brushes, will bring wholly different tactics to the next World Championship, currently set to take place in South Korea in 2014.

KitGuru Says: Esports are becoming a huge deal. I reckon give it a year or two more and we'll see this sort of thing showing up on TV's everywhere – most likely thanks to people being able to tune in via their next-gen consoles. 

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