Millions of fans around the world tune in to eSports-related events such as this weekend’s EVO tournament, which will be broadcast live from Las Vegas. However, it’s difficult to get a precise number of how many people tune in and how different games compare to each other. Fortunately, Newzoo has provided informative numbers to give us a bigger picture of the eSports scene.
Newzoo has posted a new report, Most Watched Games on Twitch by eSports and Total Hours, which measures not only the most popular titles on the streaming service, but also just how popular they are using data gathered from the past eleven months.
“Exposure on the platform can have a direct positive impact on player retention and game sales,” Newzoo noted, which echoes a similar statement made by Twitch’s Danny Hernandez.
Out of all the games on the market, established eSports favorites such as League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 dominated the list, with League‘s World Championship (Worlds) in October, generating nearly 60 million hours of viewership. In fact, League drew in almost 264 million hours of viewing over the past year alone. CS:GO also saw some big viewership numbers during the ESL One tournament in Cologne last August, gathering over 40 million hours viewed.
League accumulated 81.5 million viewing hours for June 2016 alone, making it the top selection for the month. Dota 2 followed closely behind with 56.6 million, and CS:GO took a healthy third place spot with 36.2 million. Other noteworthy titles include Blizzard’s fast-paced multiplayer shooter Overwatch (30 million) and the newcomer, Dead By Daylight (13.6 million). Other games were lower on the list, but still managed to generate a great deal of interest in terms of viewership, with the final entry, DayZ, getting 3.1 million.
Taking a closer look at the past year of viewership between the “big three” (Legends, CS:GO and Dota 2), League of Legends dominated in early October with its World Championship (as previously noted), but the numbers wavered quite a bit between the three games. Despite this, each one ultimately managed to get well over 200 million eSports hours watched on Twitch—a sign that none of these games are showing any sort of fatigue.
As far as the most-watched games on Twitch go, Dota 2 managed to swipe the lead from Legends, with 56.6 million hours watched overall for June and a 58 percent eSports share overall. Even though Legends had more hours (81.5 million), it only had a 33 percent share in eSports. Other noteworthy games on the list include Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft in fourth place (35.4 million hours, 19 percent share), Call of Duty: Black Ops III in sixth (11.5 million hours, 13 percent share) and Capcom’s popular fighting game Street Fighter V in seventh (2.4 million hours and a whopping 52 percent share). No doubt all eyes will be on Capcom’s brawler at EVO this weekend.
