League of Legends and DOTA 2 - Which is played more?

 

 

According to a report from DFC Intelligence, the first quarter of 2013 saw Dota 2 shoot pass League of Legends as the most played  “core” PC title in North America and Europe. DFC Intelligence’s PC Game meter service combines data from multiple sources including a 23 million user base from Xfire.

 

This meter only measures “core” PC games and not browser or casual titles. Such games include Diablo 2, Guild Wars 2, World of Tanks and Counter-Strike.

 

Falling far behind Dota 2 and League of Legends is the previously most played World of Warcraft.

 

DFC analyst Jeremy Miller commented that

 

“Usage of League of Legends has been steady the past year and surprisingly the huge success of Dota 2 did not seem to cut into its popularity as much as would be expected.”

 

Which game do you play in Asia? And which do you think is the most played? Do leave your comments!

 

Update: Other outlets and communities, including PCGamer and NeoGAF, have expressed skepticism about DFC Intelligence's data on this matter. With Xfire - mentioned in DFC's report - as a data source, one can see that League of Legends sits at number one with 83,009 users as of this writing, while Valve's Dota 2 is at number six with 6,685 users. Valve's live statistics on the Dota 2 Community Hubshow 251,982 concurrent players in-game on Steam, while Riot stated in March that League of Legends has over 5 million peak concurrent players worldwide.

GamesIndustry International reached out to DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole for further comment on the story. Cole stands by DFC's report on player usage, but declined to release more detailed data. He points to Asian markets like China for the discrepancy in statistics.

"We have this service that tracks usage of PC games. League of Legends is always on top by a huge margin, an order of magnitude. The only time anything came close was the launch of Diablo III, but just for a short time. Dota 2 showed a huge bump in usage; first product to do that well in a long time," said Cole in a statement to GamesIndustry International.

"The thing is globally [League of Legends] is still much bigger because we don't track Asia and many of the small markets they have penetrated. Our tracking is only key Western markets. China alone counts for way more usage of [League of Legends] than the rest of the world, so that is the major footnote we have been telling everyone," he added. "The main news to me was that Dota 2 has been a huge success."

Update 2: Riot Games has challenged DFC Intelligence's report and approachedGamesIndustry International with its own statistics on the matter. According to a Riot Games spokesperson, League of Legends sees "over 500,000 peak concurrent players every day on just the EU West shard," which doesn't even touch on players in the United States. This is contrasted with the 325,879 players that Valve's Steamgraph shows as the all-time high for Dota 2 Beta.

“You can see how we would have some issues with the accuracy of this report," said the Riot Games spokesperson in a statement.

 

Source: Gameindustry.biz