DFC Intelligence research from Xfire user data puts MOBA game in lead, World of Warcraft in second.
North America and Europe's most played PC game of the last year was League of Legends, according to a report from DFC Intelligence. The study compiled records of social gaming service Xfire's more than 21 million users from July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012, to determine that the free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena took the top spot, with almost 1.3 billion hours of activity.
Diablo III, which was present for only 45 days--a bit more than a 10th--of the studied period, managed to claim fifth place with 172.9 million hours. World of Warcraft, another Blizzard title, saw a decline in user activity but still handily secured second place with 622.4 million user hours, and indie phenomenon Minecraft locked up third place with 371.6 million hours.
"The fact that online games such [as] League of Legends eclipsed more than a billion hours of online game time in a year is simply incredible," said DFC Intelligence CEO David Cole. He compared the figures to Bungie's April announcement, which revealed that Halo players had surpassed 2 billion hours of online matches since the release of Halo 2 in 2004.
Connor Sheridan is the News Intern at GameSpot in San Francisco. He loves Super Metroid and has seen "Weird Al" Yankovic in concert three times.
if anything console gaming is dead. Wii was the last great console. Now they are just low grade PCs with half assed features & restrictions, 99% multiplat games that run identical to the other consoles. You get 12 million logging into LOL daily, i dont think theres 3 million that log into PSN daily. And the best selling console game Black Ops 2 on the xbox does not pull in these numbers, you could put all the COD games together on the xbox and it wouldnt pull in those PC numbers
2 Like I personally dont like this game as a game but i really like the way they administer it. This is a small company that think in their gamers (not as other big companies that only care about their finances) and still keep large number of players and make money.
Most MMOs would need to think about it:
-FREE to play.
But they do money with:
- Costumization of your toon.
- Premiun Toons.
- Advertasing.
That is the simple solution for a gamer, can you hear EA?
Note: PC gaming will never die and actually most of the best games in the market started as a pc games then they were introduced to a different console ;).
1 Like The game deserves it. I love ARTS games, and LoL has to easily be my number 1, even if I do like Dota 2 better. I'm sure Dota 2 will be number one when they release the full build, but with its restricted beta, i don't care much because my friends are on LoL and thats where all the fun is at. Plus, unlike shooters, I love the forced teamwork the genre gives off, and it really has captured me in a way gaming has never been capable of when it started going online.
1 Like @Smackpwn It was funny how often they were crying that. It seems to come around every five or ten years, some awkward trend of demagogues shouting that the sky is falling for PC.
@strayfies I think it's just wishful thinking. PC games are harder to produce and adapt to many systems, and they are pirated easier. Of course game companies would prefer to give up on PC. Not to mention how many of them dream about casual gaming. We hear that outcry that future is about casual gaming as well.
O.K. So what exactly am I supposed to get from this pointless article? It does absolutely nothing for me.
2 Like Gamespot gave LoL a 6.0 rating - I guess someone at Riot forgot to put the editor (Kevin VanOrd) on the payroll.
People still use Xfire? Like really? The people that use it are stuck in the stone age... I mean look at the screenshots that get posted all the time, they're all from COD4.
1 Like
you know of any other program that can record videos and upload them to a profile? Xfire is still handy for that. Once valve let's you record videos, I'll be done with xfire.
2 Like 1.3 billion hours = 148,491.8 YEARS.
imagine if people actually put that amount of time and effort into fixing the world's problems...
5 Like True, but the same could be said about people watching TV. I think it's a common thing to complain about gamers wasting their time while non-gaming families sit their night away watching sitcoms.
9 Like @bassinine This is assuming all the players have the ability and resources to even change the world. At least half are probably not even 18 yet, and on an individual basis, it probably amounts to an hour or two a player every day. Unless you are implying that all these people should be trying to change the world in their hour or two of free time and leave no time for themselves, it would be quite hard. There is a reason video games are called a pastime. If you truly were serious about this claim, then any time you just spent reading this article and posting a reply is a waste, since it could have been used to help fix the world's problems.
@Poodger Average gamer is 30.http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp
By this logic, at least half are older than 30. Not younger than 18.
1 Like @Poodger Bassinine kinda has a point though. Say the average player in the LoL community is playing two hours a day, like you claimed might be true.He could spend those two hours helping the poor. Or cleaning some sidewalk, or perhabs the side of a highway. There's always so much crap piling up there.
And this is just to mention SOME of the problems.There are so many tasks, that you'd consider trivial, even in the richer part of the world.
That said, everyone needs some free time.
But as he said. 148,491.8 is a lot of years.
Piled together, I think they could've been spent better.
@GoldenRamoth Maturity may not be earned with age, but it certainly helps. Up until a certain age, children still develop and grow mentally. It has nothing to do with personality or experience, but how the human body grows, so age often is an indicator of maturity. But of course, there are always exceptions.
Back on topic, my point was that with a game like League of Legends, I would suspect that a higher percentage of its user base is young when compared to other games on the market that attract adults. Just because the average age of "gamers" (I doubt many of these people in this statistic are TRUE gamers) is 30 doesn't mean that number will be reflective of every games community.
@Poodger Well, I don't mean to be horribly rude..
But perhaps it just has to do with what ranking you're at. Besides, maturity isn't earned with age to begin with. People at higher ranks tend not to be younger kids because they simply don't have the Hand Eye.
Just take the halo games for example, with that ranking, I rarely ran into little kids after the first few days of playing simply because they sucked so bad.
As it is, if you're a new player, you're also stuck with the banned smurf players and trolls. You know, the guys whose accounts were banned because they were rude people. So they made new accounts and played at low ranking.
With my experience, it is very rare to find a really troll/idiot. Maybe ever 1/10 or 1/20 games or so. Bad players, sure, but not outright trolls/immature kids. And I'm only 1400 elo.
@GoldenRamoth Those are overall statistics, not to be confused with statistics for individual games. The results can be skewed by a surge in casual gamers over the last 7 years. Those statistics may also include every person who plays only Angry Birds on their phone, Wii moms who only play Wii Fit, and older men who play only Madden.
My guess, and this is probably a very good one considering my experience with the League of Legends community, is that the average age of gamers in League of Legends is under 18.
XFire eh.
*links to staff*
Surely some of them will rage about it being typed as XFire and not Xfire.
Anyway, Xfire needs more users, come join us!
I don't know anyone who plays League of Legends but I guess this could be right. ???
@andrewwittmaier League of Legends is by far the biggest game right now. Last November, they reported 32 million registered accounts (sure, there are a good amount of smurf accounts among them). LoL is consistently the most viewed game on twitch.tv, currently with 30k viewers compared to the runner up, Starcraft 2's 6.5k. The finals of big tournaments such as the last MLG reach over 200k concurrent stream viewers. So yeah, I think those number could be legit.
SC2 average around 100k. while Halo could only pull in an average of 14k in the final hours of the last MLG. It being an unreleased sneak peak couldnt bring in any viewers.
A few problems with this data. 1) the users have to use XFire for the data to be collected and someone like me never uses XFire cause I hate that software. 2) Idling is an issue if your basing it off of # of hours. Someone could be launching LoL and walking away to do idk anything and come back 6 hours later. The data will always be skewed unless you get # of unique users matched with hours/games played and correlate it to time.
@Grimbear13 Two issues with this.1. There's a LOT of xfire users playing a lot of different games. It's a really large sample size, more so than you can get for a lot of studies.2. Idling is something people do in all games. You say this about LoL, and I can tell you 10 people who do the same thing with WoW. It's normal with these kinds of games (casual, social based games). If you want something as specific as you're talking about, it's going to need to be very closely monitored, which means a very small sample size, which only makes #1 a real problem.
9 Like @nurnberg And certainly not the worst either. It is a fun, addicting game that offers players a great way to spend an hour or two. The most successful games do not have to be technical wonders or works of art or anything. They simply need to provide players with a fantastic way to spend their time.
4 Like What they don't mention is how many unique users were recorded for the hours mentioned in the article.
What I'm getting at is (and this is just an example to make a point), 1.4 billion hours might not really be that much if it was spread across 500 million users.
A better record would be how many hours per player were recorded and base the average when compared to the ratio of players vs total hours played.
World of Warcraft has a less impressive number considering they've been around for a very long time and most likely have one of the highest unique player count.
I'd say that Minecraft is the most impressive. It's not free to play and it was only recently released as a full game, making those hours really stand out above the rest.
@Landsharkk Yes, indeed; that is a good point. Less sensational though, which was more than likely the point here.
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