League of Legends Topples World of Warcraft as Most Played PC Game

[Bloodstain]

snip

Indeed. I miss the time when MapleStory was just about fun.
Training at slimes and green mushrooms (sometimes even horny ones) in those Ellinia tree dungeons all day...good times, when I wasn't all concerned about PQs, merching and builds...just training and enjoying the atmosphere, carefreely having fun.

 

[cidem1324]

Yay for League of Legends. =D

 

[theultimateend]

LoL is free and WoW is 15 a month. honestly whats surprising about this?

And WoW has been in a slow decline since BC that accelerated with the release of Cata.

I thought their numbers peaked during Wrath?

Or are we talking "I didn't like it after BC!" kind of decline?

Yep thats the one. As I said in another post, the surge of new players that comes with every new raid, just wasn't as surge-y in wotlk

Ah.

BC was probably my favorite only because I really liked Dranei >_>.

Otherwise WoTLK was my favorite for getting to play with "the big kids".

Then Catacylsm had my favorite zone but it was only one damn place... You are underwater for all of an hour and then BAM back to 4 other boringish maps (OK Uldum is nice and aladdin like).

Original I would have liked had someone told me that questing gave good EXP, I came to WoW right off of Ragnarok and tried to grind levels out with kills...I was FURIOUS.

But I digress. Neat bit of info, thanks .

 

[Clockwork Scarecrow.]

Even if it leaves out other factors I'm still pretty damn impressed.

Go LoL!

 

[Farther than stars]

Now you're messing with me... I'll believe this once I hear Blizzard issuing a statement that admits defeat or at least doesn't deny the facts.

 

[Farther than stars]

well I mean, the reason is totally obvious
League of Legends is FREE
I mean, it's a good game, and I love it to death, and it totally deserves this
but the reason it is beating a majority of the games listed is because they are not free!

Yeah, but Runescape is free and it only ever got a close second to World of Warcraft. Plus, even though League of Legends is free doesn't mean their developers/publishers aren't making any revenue off their microtransactions. I'm interested to know what the company's profit is compared to Blizzard.

 

[Whytewulf]

"These statistics apply only to North American and European Xfire members"

Aaaaaand theres your problem. you are counting a minority of players. Do you honestly believe that LoL, as famous as it is, has played more hours than WoW? WoW is a game played over periods of DAYS. LoL is a "get in play a few rounds get out" game.

I dunno, i dont trust these numbers very much.

Awww shucks. LoL was such a worthy game I knew it was too good to be true.

I guess I will be forever doomed to be hipster in my tastes

It depends. Is there any reason to believe that LoL players are more likely to use Xfire than WoW players? If not then these numbers may still be significant.

On the otherhand, CoD is in 10th place, but I suspect it is much higher, as most CoD players are on consoles. I don't think it is necessarily even that popular on PC, but overall its one of the top money-making games of all time.

As you stated, I think this is the point. I think you have more WoW players that don't use xFire. I don't know any of my friends who used and they averaged 40 hours per week. In addition, COD and Battlefied are more played on consoles. Interesting numbers, but still...

 

[Dys]

Interesting that a DotA clone, particularly one as poorly done as LoL, is so popular. From what I played of it, it seemed to have no appeal to public gamers at all due to the imbalanced permanent skill tree (the old 'unlock blink, cannot be beaten by teams that haven't yet' trick).

It's not poorly done. The design point and background of the majority of their developers came from MMO backgrounds. So what you are essentially playing is an MMO style game. That is why the meta in LOL is extremely strict is because it is designed to be like an MMO.

Oh you don't have your mage or rogue? No Burst DPS for your team. No ranged AD carry? You won't have any damage output for late game. No tank and fighter? Okay you have no peel or intimidation factor for the enemy team to charge at your mage and ranged AD carry.

That is why people give so much crap if you chose a bad champion that goes against the meta it will drastically increase your chances to lose. The only other factor that is why they have bad champion design is that the power creep is where champion mechanics hard counter other champions just outright. There is literally nothing short of the stupidity of the player that the champion that is hard countered can do.

Only other problem LOL has is the drastic cost inefficiencies in attack speed items compared to AD items. You buy a wits end and ionic spark and with the same gold an AD champ can buy a phage, hexdrinker and a BFS.

EDIT: Forgot to mention the hyperscaling of armor and magic resist which leads to champions also being shutdown for the entire match and the snowballing.

I'm a little confused by this response, I never said anything of the balance of the heros or the meta. My complaint was that the permanent leveling (independent of heroes) was drastically biased against new players. Having one of the strongest skills in the game available permanently to more experienced players reflects poorly on those designing the game. Granted I never went back to it after my initial disgust, so it may have since been fixed, but as it's not uncommon for games to be ruined by less significant design flaws. I think it's surprising that a game that was originally poorly designed has become so popular. Gamers are hardly renowned for being forgiving or patient with updates or fixes.

 

[6urk17s]

Im more interested in knowing that World of Tanks and HoN is high up there.

 

[Kl3sk]

It's sad to see such a casual / childish game with such poor game-play elements has somehow reached the title of "Most Played PC Game" as of now. Quantity over quality, I suppose. As a gamer, I think League of Legends is music industry's equivalent of Justin Bieber, The Johnas Brothers, Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus combined. It doesn't take talent to sell records, and apparently, it doesn't take a good game to make it popular.

 

[beniki]

The only odd part about Riot's latest choice is that while they are certainly making more cosmetics they are only making them more expensive and eliminating the lower price tiers. Kinda backwards for a F2P game because they are basically relying on their wealthier consumers to generate their profit.

That's kind of the point of Free to Play isn't it? Your customers are basically the wealthy ones who pay for premium services, and everyone else is there to provide atmosphere/targets. It's the video game equivalent of Ladies Night.

But I was honestly surprised by this statistic... never thought a game with basically 3 maps would ever be this popular. Even with Urf the Manatee.

 

[Alanj95]

Although these numbers are only people that use Xfire and play these games, not actual totals.

 

[Ashannon Blackthorn]

HJeez, I wish people would stop saying LoL has "knocked WoW off it's throne" Earth to everyone, it hasn't. This article is biased as all hell cause it only deals with xfire. So how about all the people who don't use it? I just checked with my guild in wow... about 20 on at the time none of them use xfire. Now most of these 20 are hardcore players who log 6-10 hours a day. So that's easily 120-200 hours a day from just these 20. This is just 1 small casual guild on a rp server.

Think about that for a bit folks.

It's ramifications are really interesting though. LoL is massively popular regardless and I wonder if big companies like Blizz are paying attention to this. WoW's still top dog by a massive country mile but has been going slowly downhill for years.

MoP will bring it's number back up again but doubt it'll stay that way.

Still, bias aside it's an interesting snapshot of the trends. I almost wonder what would happen to the numbers if they reversed the situation... made LoL subscription and made WoW FTP...

 

[ace_of_something]

All these people playing it... it's free... yet... I still am just not interested.

CAPTCHA: Broken Record

Wow, so... that was weird.

 

[Waif]

"These statistics apply only to North American and European Xfire members"

I sense a severe derp in the force. All this tells me is that more LoL users use Xfire than any of those other users of any other game. I personally think the title is dreadfully pretentious. Even when I look at the so called "Broader Player Statistics". This doesn't look much like a news article, more like an advertisement for LoL.

 

[BoogieManFL]

Huh. I played it for a few hours and got bored. It just felt like so many WarCraft III tower defense/unit spam maps. And yeah. Inaccurate data gathering methods. Fail.

 

[Aur0ra145]

I LoL from time to time. Ziggs mid ftw!

 

[Digitaldreamer7]

Yea this is a terrible article. Xfire users are the only ones counted here. Fanghawk should add "by xfire users" at the end of that title. Except that no one would probably care enough to click on it tat that point.

Terrible.

Fanghawk, Your title is bad, and you should feel bad.