League of Legends has just stretched ahead to become the world’s most played PC game. According to a report provided by DFC Intelligence and XFire, users clocked up 1.3 billion hours of League of Legends last year. That’s more than double its next nearest rival, World of Warcraft with 600 million hours.
Of course, there’s a fairly enthusiastic League of Legends-playing group of TSAgents who can probably account for a little chunk of that impressive total.
Halo’s creators, Bungie, recently announced a franchise-wide landmark for online play of 2 billion hours but that was over ten years of fervent community love and support. For League of Legends to achieve such high numbers in only one year is astounding.
Diablo III made the chart with only 45 days of availability resulting in almost 173 million hours of gameplay. Heroes of Newerth also had a big impact, showing the Free to Play model is really soaring. Battlefield 3 proved significantly more popular than Modern Warfare 3 among PC players too, racking up almost 50 million more play-hours. Other PC staples like Minecraft, Starcraft and World of Tanks filled out the other positions.
So, the many stories from a couple of years ago that predicted PC gaming’s death were greatly exaggerated, then.
Source: Forbes
SavageOranges
Free to play will take off. Wonder how LoL and HoN will fare when DOTA 2 rolls around.
bunimomike
Free to Play has already taken off. See LoL for details. :P
Sympozium
That is mental…. I’ve yet to play it, installed it. Haven’t played a single hour of it but it certainly looks like a good game to play with friends much like Monster Hunter.
AG2297
Been playing this with people a lot lately (some from TSA), glad that it has done so well and it’s quite a shock to see it dominate even WoW in terms of hours played.
As for PC gaming, id say it’s getting stronger and stronger and has been for a while. Steam has been a much stronger platform than PSN or Xbox LIVE for me and generally communication and multiplayer gaming is hugely easier on PC than it is on console and most of the time I want to play games with my friends. As the next generation of consoles comes this might change if the systems have good, fast and reliable ways to counter Skype and Steam but for now the current consoles don’t and their age, from a PC gamer point of view, is really starting to show.
That might sound a bit anti-console, it’s really not, it’s just that PC has been growing so well and it’d be great to see the next generation of consoles share the positives that PC gaming has over the current consoles so I can play my Metal Gear Solid and my Uncharted or Gears of War in the same way I could on PC.
An-dz
Steam being much cheaper than buying games on other sercies and normal highstreet stores definitively helps, and the fact that a PC can run more than one program at once, with skype going and the game and then jump out to look at an internet browser. I dont think consoles will ever reach that point, but they win in ease of use by far which is why i still have one.
AG2297
For me ease of use go’s to my PC though due to everything being pretty much instantaneous from loading games to having 5 friends in the game all in the same call. But I can see what you mean still, with the simplicity of a console over PC.
I’m hoping the next gen consoles might be capable of running such a service as Skype while also playing games. The Vita has a Skype app I believe, and with the extra RAM in next gen consoles it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine it being possible.
An-dz
I wonder how long it will do on when Dota 2 is finally launched to the public though.
hazelam
i tried it, didn’t enjoy it, but clearly i’m in the minority there.
and you know what, i’m fine with that.
impressive numbers anyway.
Jakster123x
Damn. Dunno whether to be impressed or scared.