While X-fire might not be the best barometer of popularity as a guideline it's probably not half bad and right now the stats suggest that League of Legends is the most popular PC game in the world.

That's what a report in Forbes has published today has stated and certainly the evidence is quite compelling. Having double the number of hours played when compared to World of Warcraft in the last year, it certainly indicates the game is hugely popular.

The CEO of the company that collated the data, David Cole of DFC Intelligence, said:

“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.

The top ten games and their hours are below:

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: MW 3 126,754,082

The data was taken from 21 million Xfire users.