According to Gamesindustry.biz a market research group and consulting firm called DFC Intelligence has released a report stating that DOTA 2 has exceeded League of Legends in terms of "usage".

This news is to be taken with a grain of salt as there are a lot of elements to bear in mind here. First of all, the research firm uses the term usage which already raises question marks. Secondly they were only interested in full-fledged games, thus they ignored Facebook games and similar in addition they are only looking at PC titles.

With that in mind, they also claim to have combined data from multiple sources, including Xfire statistical tracking. A big question here is how did they successfully combine sources? People who play DOTA 2 through Steam and also have Raptr and Xfire running will then rack up hours on all three of their profiles. If DFC then "combines" the data they would be adding up the hours of one person three times. Sadly, the full report is copyrighted and costs 6,000 Dollars to purchase so all of this will remain a mystery until someone shares the report over the internet (if ever).

Additionally, their report does not coincide at all with Steam stats and the official Riot stats, nor even Xfire stats. League of Legends was announced by Riot as having over 5 million concurrent players across all its servers, while DOTA 2 according to SteamGraph at the same time had only peaked at 326,000 concurrent players. So already that should make anyone weary of this report by DFC Intelligence.