‘Dota 2’ Reaches 1 Million Concurrent Players On Steam

Dota 2 has reached 1 million concurrent players on the Steam PC gaming service. The online gaming distribution service, which has become the de facto distributer of PC gaming titles across Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, displayed the impressive statistics on their online measuring page. It also earns the distinction of being the first game in Steam’s 12-year history to reach 1 millions concurrent users for one specific title.

This number, while impressive for Steam, has a long way to go to in order to catch up to the other MOBA (Massive Online Battle Arena) juggernaut. League of Legends, as of two years ago according to Polygon, posted 5 million to 7.5 million players online concurrently exceeding Dota 2 by a long shot. Riot Games’, the developer behind League of Legends, last statistic from 2012 cited that 67 million players log time with the game on a monthly basis.

The popularity of Dota 2 is also twice that of the next game listed in Steam’s top online games. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was next down the list with 420,000 concurrent users. Team Fortress 2 was further in the back field with 63,000 users. Other games to make the Top 10 for the weekend were Football Manager 2015, Garry’s Mod, Civ V, Skyrim, Arma 3 Total War: ROME and H1Z1.

Dota 2 is the sequel to Defense of the Ancients, originally a modification to Blizzard’s Warcraft III which many cite as the birth of the MOBA genre. The premise is simple in concept: Each player has heavily guarded structures at their end of the map and the objective is to destroy the other player’s structures called Ancients. Players control heroes and AI scripted fighters to do their bidding with the heroes being able to level up and buy better equipment as the match progresses.

The mod grew in popularity amongst Blizzard’s community with a developer named “Ice Frog” having the reins of the most popular version of Dota. IceFrog was hired by Valve to develop Dota 2 after a studio tour. This led to the original mod creators who worked for Riot Games filing objections to Valve’s trademark of the Dota 2 name. Eurogamer also reported on Blizzard, who claimed rights based on its assets and world building tools as the origin for the games. Eventually an agreement was made that let Valve publish the Dota 2 title while Blizzard will release their own MOBA entitled Heroes of the Storm in 2015, which you can read about elsewhere on the Inquisitr.

[Image Source | Dota 2]