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"League of Legends" is just one game driving the esports industry, which will top $1 billion in revenue this year, according to research from Newzoo. While esports have long been popular in many Asian countries, the space has grown worldwide over the past few years, including in North America. The world finals in 2017, held in Beijing's Olympic "Bird's Nest" stadium, sold out to a crowd of 40,000, the total number of seats made available for the game that day. Tickets for that "League of Legends" world final sold out in less than four hours upon their release, prompting Riot to release an additional 3,000 tickets on top of an initial batch of 23,000.
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This was after viewership for 2017's Super Bowl LI had dipped to 103 million from just over 111 million the year prior. For comparison, last year's Super Bowl had just over 98 million viewers, the smallest viewership number for the event since 2008. Go back to November, and viewership numbers from the "League of Legends" World Championship finals - held in South Korea and also hosted by the game's publisher, Riot Games - showed that almost 100 million unique viewers tuned in to the event online.
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