Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

World of Tanks tops League of Legends with 45 million players

Anthony John Agnello
By
World of Warplanes
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Free-to-play games may not replace full-priced games that you download or buy in a store, but there’s certainly a mammoth audience for web-based freebies. When we think of the world’s most popular games, we tend to picture Call of Duty, FIFA, or Super Mario Bros. but here at the end of 2012, it would be better to think about World of Tanks. Wargaming, publisher of the appropriately named MMO, now has a user base of 45 million players. To put that in perspective, that’s just less than 4 times the 2010 peak membership of World of Warcraft.

“The tremendous success of World of Tanks has showcased that the company has developed a strong and reliable technological platform with an incredible amount of remaining potential,” said Wargaming’s Andrei Yarantsau, “The result is that we’ll keep being able to provide top-notch online services and regular high quality content and updates.”

Recommended Videos

Put another way: A ridiculous number of people around the world are playing our game, it’s making us money, so we’re going to be able to keep making a lot of games similar to this.

Related

45 million is an astronomical number of players for any game, and it places World of Tanks in the upper echelon of the most-widely played games on the planet. There were 600,000 players on a single Russian server playing simultaneously at one point this year. To put that in perspective, the entire top 100 games on Steam logged 650,000 users on May 10 this year. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, one of the most successful games ever released, logged 3.3 million players online but worldwide and over the course of an entire day.

World of Tanks’ major competitor is the free-to-play strategy game League of Legends. League has just 35 million daily active users compared to World of Tanks’ 45 million, but it does log about 12 million daily users.

Wargaming is going to try and keep its empire growing with two more MMOs next year. World of Warplanes and World of Warships are currently in beta testing but the company aims to have them open for business next year.

Editors' Recommendations

Anthony John Agnello
Anthony John Agnello
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. He works as the Community Manager of Joystiq.com and his writing has…
Dauntless hits 5 million players in first week; Phoenix Labs tries to keep up
dauntless 5 million players

Dauntless, a free-to-play monster hunting game, surpassed 5 million players within the first week since its  launch, despite being plagued with long queue times due to player demand.

Dauntless was released on May 21 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and on the PC as an Epic Games Store exclusive, with the impressive milestone a far cry from the interest that the game drew when it was previously launched as a beta version for just the PC. The demand for access to the free-to-play challenger to Monster Hunter: World was so massive that developer Phoenix Labs initially had trouble in trying to keep up.

Read more
How to turn off the DualSense controller speaker on PS5
PS5 Dual Sense controller on a dark background.

There are a lot of creative features integrated into the PlayStation 5's DualSense controller, including a small speaker that is often used to add a layer of immersion in certain games. However, if you're annoyed by this speaker's interruptions — or if you're just trying to cut down on noise while folks are sleeping, perhaps — you can actually disable this feature altogether. Here's how to turn off the DualSense controller speaker on your PS5.

Read more
How to sign up for the Hades 2 playtest
Melinoe fighting in a dark forest.

We first saw Hades 2 last year when it was announced, but it has yet to receive a release date. We know it will first be coming to early access, just like the first game, but the only timeframe we have is the second quarter of 2024. It appears that Supergiant might be closing in on that date, however, as you can now sign up for the first playtest and experience the game even before it comes to early access. This technical test is a said to be a major step toward early access to resolve any technical problems before a wider audience can play. Here's how you can sign up to be part of a small team selected to play the game before anyone else.

Read more