Few games can compete with World of Warcraft when it comes to absorbing players in its fictional world, compelling them to play into the wee hours of the morning at the expense of time spent with their pillow. In fact, there was only one, and not only did it compete with WoW, it flat out crushed it.
That one was Riot Games' League of Legends, in which players logged just under 1.3 billion hours over the course of the last year (July 1, 2011 ~ June 30, 2012). Yes, you read that right...billion. That staggering number was compiled courtesy of usage data from the more than 20 million Xfire users who play their online games while logged into the gaming chat (among other things) service.
World of Warcraft was a distant 2nd, with players spending less than half the time in Azeroth than they did in...whatever LoL's world is called. The customizable Minecraft came in a solid 3rd, followed by Heroes of Newerth, another MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game like LoL in 4th.
Considering its recent release, Diablo 3 made a strong, yet not unexpected showing in 5th with 172 million hours logged since the game's May 15, 2012 release. Over the course of an entire year at that rate, Diablo 3 would've finished first, with over 1.3 billion hours logged. However, it's also likely that the first few months of Diablo 3's release will be its most active, and that usage rate is unlikely to persist over the course of an entire year.
Rounding out the top 10 were the large-scale war FPS Battlefield 3, the cute 2D MMORPG MapleStory, the RTS StarCraft 2, the MMO-action game World of Tanks, and the FPS Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
Are you surprised by any of the games that did or did not make the list? Can any game topple LoL in the coming year? Which online game took up the majority of your time over the past year? Let us know in the comments.
