DOTA 2 Declared the Champion
It’s not just players who have drama in the MOBA world. Now two popular games seem to be the focus of an uproar as DOTA 2 was recently dubbed “the most played PC game of 2013″ in a report that was put together and published by DFC Intelligence. The report stated that DOTA 2had surpassed League of Legends as the most played “core” PC game this year according to hours played. The data was supposedly gathered using XFire and other unnamed intelligence gathering sources.
When the first story first began making the rounds skeptics immediately began poking holes in the report. DFC was claiming DOTA 2 was the most played PC title in the world, but it wasn’t even number one on XFire, the only source that was actually named in the report. Nor is it number two. You have to go all the way down to number 6 to get to DOTA 2 on Xfire’s most played list.League of Legends sits atop the XFire “top ten” rankings with a sizeable lead over even the second place Call of Duty 4. Add to that the fact that XFire users only represent a portion of PC Gamers, and you can see where doubt about the validity of the report began to seep in.
On top of that, common gamer sense tells you that it is highly unlikely that an unlaunched beta game is going to surpass what is considered one of the most popular games in the world. As easy as it actually is to get into the DOTA 2 beta, that is still a barrier, and as we all know, any barrier to entry is a giant STOP sign for a lot of gamers.
Riot Fires Back
After all the skeptics had their go at the DFC report, Riot decided it was time to step in and let loose with some information of their own. 500,000 concurrent users daily is what they lead off with. So far according to Steam, DOTA 2‘s highest concurrent user number so far peaked at just under 326,000. That’s quite a difference in itself. Oh, and that 500,000 per day that Riot was talking about…that’s just on the EU West League of Legends server.
“You can see how we would have some issues with the accuracy of this report,” said a Riot Games spokesperson in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz.
DFC Backtracks
What has followed since the initial release of the report is DFC Intelligence’s owner David Cole making a statement to PCGamer in an attempt to clarify his company’s report and findings.
“The thing with us is we are getting core gamers in North America and Europe only. LOL has a ton of users in markets we don’t track,” Cole said in his statement to PCGamer.
“Riot is actually going to give us some actual numbers so we can compare,” Cole continued. “LOL does have a lot more users and we may have underestimated LOL. Thing is, we have never seen anything like it, so have been pretty conservative. But Dota 2 is still big.”
So basically, what he’s saying is PR speak for ‘we didn’t actually have the proper data to compare numbers between these two games but we released a report about it anyway’. My words, not theirs.
Since clarifying DFC’s findings, the original press release for the report has been pulled.
The Sad Truth
You can argue all day long which game is better, but for right now there’s not much doubt about which one is bigger, and that’s League of Legends. DOTA 2 is definitely in a position to give LoLa run for its money, but it isn’t quite time for that. Let’s at least wait for DOTA 2′s release before we worry about who is king of the mountain.
Besides, at the end of the day, deep down in places we don’t want to talk about, we all know that the “most played” PC games are things like Candy Crush or Farmville. We “core” gamers just pretend to live in a world where those games don’t exist.
What has followed since the initial release of the report is DFC Intelligence’s owner David Cole making a statement to PCGamer in an attempt to clarify his company’s report and findings.
“The thing with us is we are getting core gamers in North America and Europe only. LOL has a ton of users in markets we don’t track,” Cole said in his statement to PCGamer.
“Riot is actually going to give us some actual numbers so we can compare,” Cole continued. “LOL does have a lot more users and we may have underestimated LOL. Thing is, we have never seen anything like it, so have been pretty conservative. But Dota 2 is still big.”
So basically, what he’s saying is PR speak for ‘we didn’t actually have the proper data to compare numbers between these two games but we released a report about it anyway’. My words, not theirs.
Since clarifying DFC’s findings, the original press release for the report has been pulled.
The Sad Truth
You can argue all day long which game is better, but for right now there’s not much doubt about which one is bigger, and that’s League of Legends. DOTA 2 is definitely in a position to give LoLa run for its money, but it isn’t quite time for that. Let’s at least wait for DOTA 2′s release before we worry about who is king of the mountain.
Besides, at the end of the day, deep down in places we don’t want to talk about, we all know that the “most played” PC games are things like Candy Crush or Farmville. We “core” gamers just pretend to live in a world where those games don’t exist.
Author: Troy Blackburn
