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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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This is how big League of Legends is

DOTA? I MOBA DOTA.

League of Legends is bigger.

It's bigger than World of Warcraft's peak 12 million monthly users. League of Legends has 35 million active monthly users.

It's bigger than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's peak 3.3 million daily players. League of Legends has 12 million daily active players. Even Instagram only commands 7.5 million users a day. Pfft.

It's bigger than the entire top 100 games on Steam which, on 10th May, attracted 650,000 concurrent users. League of Legends, on a typical day in July, had 3 million concurrent players.

It's bigger than Halo, which soaked up 2 billion hours of play-time since 2004. League of Legends racks up 1 billion hours a month.

It's bigger than Psy, the Korean pop star whose Gangnam style video has 1.4 million Facebook Likes. League of Legends has 4.1 million.

It is - as developer Riot deduced from hours played a month - "the most played video game in the world".

It's all subjective of course - League of Legends is free-to-play, for a start - but it makes for an impressive infographic.

All that for being the first proper emulation of popular Warcraft 3 mode Defense of the Ancients. It's no wonder Blizzard and Valve now want a piece of the pie with their respective DOTA-inspired games.

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