The team behind League of Legends, Riot Games, has won another legal dispute against the peddlers of smut. A ruling declared Riot Games the new commander over LeagueofLegendsPorn.com. Interestingly enough, the site didn't actually host any pornography. Visitors were only greeted with the phrase of the "future home of something quite cool."
Surprisingly, this isn't the first time Riot Games has gone to war against pornography sites.
This past summer, Riot Games won control of the domain "leagueoflegends.co," which, prior to Riot's lawsuit against the site for trademark infringement, was a redirect to a porn site. Obviously a case of cybersquatting, gamers with the unfortunate lack of ability to type in an "m" at the end of a url (it affects more people than you might think, truly a terrible affliction) now no longer have anything to worry about.
While dishonest overall (porn sites are dishonest?), it's an effective strategy to ride the coattails of League of Legends. Forbes reported in July that "new data from Xfire shows that Riot Games' League of Legends is now officially the most played PC game in North America and Europe. When you add in the rise of the game in Korea, where it's already beating out StarCraft II as the most popular game, it's clear that League of Legends is here to stay."
Xfire logs what games users are playing, how many hours they have played them, and saves other information (such as scores) from game servers. Malcolm CasSelle, Xfire CEO explains, "The Xfire application lets us examine the real-time data of users as they play any of our more than 2,000 supported games." Working with them, DFC Intelligence managed to compile a list of some of the most popular games based on the total amount of hours played by ALL of the players. In the end, League of Legends came out on top with close to 1.3 billion hours of gameplay.