K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

What we called an esports pattern was one game

Name: What we called an esports pattern was one game
Creator: K Culture Wire

We called it an esports pattern. Splitting by game shows it was one game.

12 of the 14 players we could measure play League of Legends — 85.7%.

This narrows something we published earlier

An earlier piece of ours said Korean esports players in these editions peak in a single month. Split by game, almost every one of them turns out to play the same game, so the honest version is narrower: it is a League of Legends pattern, and we could not test whether it holds for any other title.

Four questions, one row each

Game	Korean players on Wikidata	With an article in these four editions	Share	Read enough to measure	Sharing a peak month
League of Legends	418	16	3.8%	12	11 of 12 in November
StarCraft II	481	4	0.8%	2	fewer than 3 — we do not say
Pokémon Trading Card Game	—	1	—	0	fewer than 3 — we do not say
Valorant	9	1	11.1%	0	fewer than 3 — we do not say

Read the second column against the third. Korea has 481 StarCraft II players on Wikidata and 418 League of Legends players — more of the former. In these four editions, 4 StarCraft II players have an article and 16 League of Legends players do.

The other games were not tested and found different

It is not that other games were checked and found different. There were not enough readers to check. Korea has more StarCraft II players on Wikidata than League of Legends players, and four of them have an article in these four editions.

Games with a group large enough to place a peak month: 1. One group cannot be compared with anything, so the question of whether this crosses games stays open.

“Read enough to measure” means at least 250 reads across the four editions in 2025. A group needs 3 such players before we report a peak month for it, because below that one person decides the answer.

How this was counted, and one wrong turn

Source — Wikidata for Korean esports players and the game each competes in; Wikimedia Pageviews API, four Southeast Asian editions summed, calendar year 2025
Unit — People. One row is one player, counted under their first listed game.

Wikidata records the game in P2416, not in P641. P641 says "esports" for 1,263 of the 1,266 Korean players, which is true and useless. We spent a run finding that out.

Wikidata lists a game for some players and not others, and a player who competed in two is counted under the first. This is a floor on how many play each game.

A year of readers in one month · The comparison we could not make · What we have corrected · How we count

What we wrote from this data

What we called an esports pattern turns out to be one game
We said Korean esports players in the Southeast Asian Wikipedias all peak in one month. Split by game, 85.7% of them play League of Legends. Korea has more StarCraft II players, and four of them have an article in those editions.
13 August 2026