On Saturday more people were playing Dota 2 at the same time than there are residents of St. Louis .
Valve's multiplayer phenomenon surpassed its previous record for concurrent players on Saturday, reaching 329,977 simultaneous users. The stars may have simply aligned to produce an usual amount of free time for PC gamers, but it's more likely that there were piles of people logging into Dota 2 to watch the West Qualifier for The International 3 through the client itself.
Whether or not this makes Dota 2 the most-played game on PC remains unclear. An April report measured from a variety of unnamed sources (but including ancient utilities like Xfire) put Dota 2 above League of Legends. Riot Games claimed in response that a single server shard for LoL exceeded 500,000 simultaneous players at its daily peak. Both sets of data are unverifiable and incomplete, but our gut tells us that League of Legends' longer history (two years more than Dota 2) would give it a higher population worldwide.
Dota 2's weekend spike in concurrent players—which we always encourage you to think of as an indicator of a game's population rather than an exact representation—also comes on the heels of the Interactive Compendium .
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