One-person company that makes League of Legends stat tool gets $55M buyout

Wargraphs is a Paris-based company that, until last week, had one employee, 35-year-old Jean-Nicolas Mastin, and made two major products: League of Graphs and Porofessor.

If you don't play or watch League of Legends matches (or TeamFight Tactics or Legends of Runeterra), you've never heard of these apps. If you do, the dense stats of League of Graphs, and the in-game tool to see them, Porofessor, can be invaluable tools to understanding the win rates, character picks, and other deep stats of each competitive player. Gold, kills, and "creeps" per minute, "Kill participation," "Wards placed," and other stats are updated in real time, as are the popularities of each player character, providing some instant meta discussion.

The tools, in development since at least 2013, are dense, colorful, and can be loaded into your game with the help of another tool, Overwolf—itself the recipient of $52.5 million in funding two years ago, valuing the company at more than $500 million. And they're based on Riot Games' API.

You might be asking yourself how many people are digging this deep into a single game. MOBA Network, a Swedish acquisition firm focused on multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBA), provided one answer last week: 50 million euros' worth (roughly $55 million)

According to MOBA's press release on the acquisition (as spotted by TechCrunch), Wargraphs made 12.3 million euros ($13.4 million) in sales during the year leading up to November 2022, selling advertising against its sites and in-game app. Wargraphs has 800,000 daily users, the Porofessor app has been downloaded almost 10 million times, and the sites have 4.5 billion page views.

"Together with the founder... we already have plans how to develop the assets further and expand into new games and markets," MOBA Network CEO Björn Mannerqvist wrote.

It's not an easy time to raise money for a digital startup right now, but gaming services—especially those with established revenues in well-developed games like League—may be an exception. You can look in some corners of esports to see foundering leagues with overblown ambitions. But proven popular games, and the services that organically grow around them, seem to be far from suffering.

League's design director, Greg Street, sat down with Ars in 2018 to talk about the game's evolution, how it addresses casual and esports players, and more.

Listing image by Getty Images