Yesterday, industry research firm DFC Intelligence released a fascinating report. Via a variety of sources they’d discovered that, in the first part of 2013, Dota 2 had overtaken League of Legends to become the most-played “core” PC game in the Western world. Amazing, yes?
No, say Riot Games, pointing to their own statistics. Party hats off. “You can see how we would have some issues with the accuracy of this report,” said a spokesperson for the LoL developers.
Riot approached original source GamesIndustry with their own numbers, which paint a rather different picture of the two games’ respective Western player bases. League of Legends sees “over 500,000 peak concurrent players every day on just the EU West shard,” say Riot, which excludes the game’s sizeable US following. By contrast, the Dota 2 beta has enjoyed a comparatively small (but nevertheless massive) 325,879 players at its peak, according to Valve’s Steamgraph.
What’s more, DFC’s report cited Xfire as one of its key statistical sources. But Xfire’spublic statscredit League of Legends with a whopping 83,009 hours per day, while Dota 2 holds up the lower end of their top ten chart with 6,685.
DFC Intelligence have since removed the press release designed to promote their report, originally published here.
So there we have it: this huge MOBA is bigger than that huge MOBA. Which do you play, and why?