League of Legends revenues for 2013 total $624 million [UPDATE]
League of Legends came in second in terms of revenue for F2P games, coming in behind South Korean FPS CrossFire.
UPDATE: Following the publication of this story, a representative from Nexon reached out to clarify that their game, Dungeon&Fighter "surpassed the number one game, Crossfire, by a significant amount."
Although they're unable to provide specific revenue figures due to a contract with Tencent, the Nexon representative wrote, "If you were to take the figure stated in the Superdata report as net revenue and apply the industry standard 30% revenue share to the developer (as stated on page 25 of Deutsche Bank analyst Hanjoon Kim’s July 1, 2013 report), that would make the gross revenue for Dungeon&Fighter $1.4bn, exceeding Crossfire by over $450 million. While these are not our internal figures, I believe that this gives a good indication of the size of Dungeon&Fighter."
The original story appears below
League of Legends' revenues for 2013 totaled $624 million, making it the second top free-to-play game in terms of earnings, a report from SuperData reveals.
Coming in at the number one spot is CrossFire, a South Korean free-to-play first-person shooter which brought in $957 million in revenues during 2013. Tencent, which owns a majority stake in League of Legends developer Riot Games, publishes CrossFire as well.
Valve rounded out the top 10 list with Counter-Strike Online, which brought in $121 million, and Team Fortress 2 at the number nine spot bringing in $139 million.
Electronic Art's Star Wars: The Old Republic, which added a free-to-play option in 2012, took the number eight spot with a little more than Team Fortress 2, and less than Blizzard's World of Warcraft, which generated $213 in microtransactions alone (not counting subscription fees).
Last week we also reported that Blizzard was beefing up its microtransaction efforts in World of Warcraft, when it posted a pair of new jobs on its "Strategic Initiatives" team, calling for a director and manager for the company's new "Microtransaction Strategy" unit.
World of Tanks was fourth on the list with $372 million.
Overall, the digital games market in the United States (including social, mobile, DLC, free-to-play, and subscription) grew by 11 percent, reaching a total of $11.7 billion in sales during 2013. Mobile represented the biggest portion of the market with 26 percent, but free-to-play showed the greatest growth, increasing by 45 percent over last year. Meanwhile, revenues from social games dropped by 22 percent and revenues from subscriptions dropped by 21 percent.
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