37 CCU avg is a dead game, that’s admirable they put a best effort into making their last players happy. That also means, while a little embarrassing to lose code, it’s not a big deal. And it’s also not surprising they’d edit the code on the server and not have it in SVN, game development is full of sins like that.
Yep, power laws at work. Look at Twitch viewer numbers for another real time example. The distribution is always concentrated at the top, followed by a long tail. Also the case with the best selling apps, books, movies, etc.
In 2014 Riot released numbers of 7.5MM peak concurrent players for League of Legends (off a MAU 67MM) and in 2016 reported a MAU of 100MM (but no new concurrency figures). Those are old stats but still useful for comparison.
Disclaimer: I work at Riot but don't have any internal numbers to share.
Update: corrected to CCU from MAU