League of Legends’ official Instagram account recently shared the number of minions slayed by all League players in 2022. With an impressive one trillion minions taken down last year, 2022 might be one of the most fruitful years for the game. The account also said it would take over 25,000 years for that many minions to spawn in one game. With those numbers revealed it only takes some math to roughly estimate how many games of League were played in 2022.
Although Riot Games didn’t share the official amount of games played in 2022 or the years before that, with the number of minions slayed in one year players can trace back to a rough estimate of that statistic.
First, you need to calculate the average time a player spends on the Rift in a single game. Since a game’s duration differs based on a player’s rank, it requires collecting all rankings’ game durations and finding the average minute count. Using League of Graphs’ game duration statistics page players can estimate that the average game of League lasts about 26 minutes.
Then comes the hard part. Knowing how long the average League game lasts, players can also estimate how many minions spawn during that time. Take into consideration that minions’ spawn time differs from type to type and that the first wave spawns after the first minute of the game—at 1:05 to be precise.
According to League’s wiki minion page, each wave has three caster and three melee minions, while siege minions spawn frequency varies based on the game’s timer. Before the 15 minutes mark, a siege minion spawns every two waves, and after that, it spawns every two waves. But after the 25th minute, a siege minion appears in every wave and only stops spawning once super minions come to take their place after players destroy the enemy inhibitors.
By taking into consideration all this information and the fact that a minion wave spawns every 30 seconds after the first one, players can estimate that in 26 minutes of the game around 321 minions per side per lane spawn. Multiply that for three lanes and two sides and that’s 1926 minions in a 26-minute game.
Now back to the official information. Riot revealed that in 2022 one trillion minions were slayed. By dividing that number by the number of minions spawned in an average game of League, players can obtain find an estimate of how many games it took to reach that number. After doing some math it can be said that in 2022 more than 519 million games of League were played.
To corroborate the math behind it you could use the other official statistic shared by Riot on the Instagram post. Take the number of games that should have been played in 2022 and multiply it by the average game time to find out how many minutes players spent in-game last year. No one besides Riot, however, knows how many players there are so it’s impossible to know how many minutes each League player has played but we could assume it was a single person.
This hypothetical super-fan would have needed to play for more than 13 billion minutes and kill every single minion in all games played to reach a total of one trillion. That many minutes equals around 25 thousand years, which is the same amount Riot said it would take for one trillion minions to spawn in a single game of League.
