Most played PC game revealed

What’s the most-played game on PC today? If you guessed World of Warcraft, you’re so wrong. I’d have guessed Minesweeper or Freecell or Where Did I Save That Very Important File, so apparently I’m wrong too.

According to research by DFC Intelligence and XFire, the biggest thing in PC gaming right now is League of Legends, with almost 1.3 billion total hours clocked by players over the last year. That’s nearly twice the number of hours of World of Warcraft played in the same time period, and more than a billion times the number of hours spent outside in the sunshine instead. Nice.

“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. By comparison, Bungie recently announced that the Halo franchise surpassed 2 billion hours of online play, but that’s over a period of seven years,” said DFC Intelligence boss David Cole.

The report found that, between July 2011 and June 2012, the top ten PC games by hours logged were:

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

“Diablo III was not released until mid-May but in just 45 days, usage of the game has equalled 172 million hours,” added Cole. “Usage of course declines after launch, but it is still doing quite well and may surpass World of Warcraft in usage over the next year.”

Or maybe not.