'League of Legends' beats out 'World of Warcraft' as most played PC game

League of Legends is top dog in PC gaming, beating out World of Warcraft as most played PC game in the United States and Europe.

League of Legends, the popular free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena title, is the most played PC game over the last year in North America and Europe, it was announced by DFC Intelligence in conjunction with Xfire.

The game beat out the massively multiplayer behemoth World of Warcraft with nearly 1.3 billion hours of gameplay logged. World of Warcraft in comparison registered more than 600 million hours of gameplay.

"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 two billion hours of online play, but that's over a period of seven years." said David Cole, CEO of DFC Intelligence.

The study also shows Diablo III, which released this May, saw 172 million hours of gameplay in just 45 days of usage.

A full list of hours logged from July 2011 to June 2012 is as follows:

• 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

The list is based on usage data from over 21 million Xfire members from July 1^st, 2011 to June 30^th, 2012. The Xfire application allows the company to monitor real-time data of users playing any one of its 2000 supported games.