Dota 2's Pudge becomes the MOBA's first character to be played in over a billion matches

Dota 2's Pudge has become the first character in the MOBA's history to be played in more than a billion matches, making the portly butcher the game's most popular character by about 300 million matches.

As tracked by the website Dotabuff, Pudge had been played in 1,000,059,649 Dota 2 matches at the time of writing, with a Pick Rate of 33.03%. This puts him substantially ahead of the second-most popular character, Phantom Assassin, who has a measly 704,021,392 matches played by comparison...