The Old Republic racks up 60 million hours, Dark Side luring more players

Star Wars: The Old Republic has continued its surge of new players after the game's late December release, EA has announced. Since the December 20 launch, players have logged more than 60 million in-game hours. 5.5 million of those are from the holiday weekend alone, because who wants to spend time with family when you could be using the Force?

EA compares that figure to watching all six Star Wars movies about four million times; we'd suggest just watching the good ones eight million times. Meanwhile, the Dark Side is obviously more seductive, as Sith Warriors are outpacing Jedi Knights by 850,000 to 810,000, respectively.

Players have completed 260 million quests, 44 million PvP battles, 9 million space combat missions, and wiped out 3 billion NPCs. That sounds a bit less like a bragging stat and more like casual genocide, but congrats to all the players who contributed to that goal.

The downside of this popularity is that servers have been flooded and players have had to wait in long queue lines. BioWare itself recommended populating one of the less crowded servers to ease the problem. Check out our first look for more impressions.