It's creation may have been based on a map from Warcraft 3, but League of Legends has surpassed it, as well as all other PC games, to become the most played PC game in the world.
Forbes reports that "new data from Xfire shows that Riot Games' League of Legends is now officially the most played PC game in North America and Europe. When you add in the rise of the game in Korea, where it's already beating out StarCraft II as the most popular game, it's clear that League of Legends is here to stay."
Xfire logs what games users are playing, how many hours they have played them, and saves other information (such as scores) from game servers. Malcolm CasSelle, Xfire CEO explains, "The Xfire application lets us examine the real-time data of users as they play any of our more than 2,000 supported games." Working with them, DFC Intelligence managed to compile a list of some of the most popular games based on the total amount of hours played by ALL of the players. In the end, League of Legends came out on top with close to 1.3 billion hours of gameplay. The list can be seen below.
League of Legends - 1,292,502,456
World of Warcraft - 622,378,909
Minecraft - 371,635,651
Heroes of Newerth - 184,520,156
Diablo III - 172,907,605
Battlefield 3 - 171,852,550
MapleStory - 165,503,651
StarCraft II - 163,980,293
World Of Tanks - 145,702,931
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - 126,754,082
"The fact that online games such League of Legends eclipsed more than a billion hours of online game time in a year is simply incredible and a testament to the fundamental shift currently sweeping through the games industry." said David Cole, CEO of DFC Intelligence.
The list was made using data from over 21 million Xfire members from last July, 2011, to the end of June, 2012.
