World of Tanks tops League of Legends with 45 million players

By Anthony John Agnello December 21, 2012

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.”

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.

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

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…

Gaming

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.

Gaming

3 PlayStation Plus games you need to play this weekend (May 10-12)

Miles Morales in Spider-Man outfit fending off crime.

The weekend is here, so you probably want to sit back and relax by playing some video games. If you're subscribed to PlayStation Plus Premium or Extra on PS4 or PS5, then there are tons of fantastic titles to choose from in the subscription service's vast game catalog. It's a lot to sift through, so I've handpicked three titles I think you should check out if you haven't played them already.

One is a superhero game that launched alongside the PS5 and can be beaten within a weekend. The next is an eerie indie Metroidvania that just got added to PS Plus Extra when it launched on May 9. Finally, there's a sequel to a fantastic roguelike (not Hades 2) where you play as a new person in the same family every time you die.
Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Gaming

3 free video games you should play this weekend (May 10-12)

A titan wielding a grenade launcher in Destiny 2..

Whenever we recommend games at Digital Trends, we tend to go heavy on titles available on subscription services like Xbox Game Pass. Rather than telling our readers to buy new games, we always try to find ones that might be on services they're already paying for. Still, that doesn't cover every player. There are plenty of more casual gaming fans who aren't subscribed to any service that offers extra games. We don't want to leave them out, do we?

If you're in that category, or you're simply strapped for cash, we've got some recommendations for some free games you can try this weekend. I don't mean "free with a subscription" either. I'm talking about games that will cost you nothing to start, even if you decide you want to spend money on them later. From a mobile game I can't get enough of to a a popular MMO that just made all of its DLC free, these are three free games you can dive into this weekend.
Destiny 2