The audience for eSports is expanding, and the viewership numbers provided by Riot Games provides stark evidence of this. The League of Legends Season 3 World Championship was was watched by over 32 million fans worldwide, as South Korea’s SK Telecom T1 earned the Summoner’s Cup in front of a sold-out Staples Center. At peak, more than 8.5 million fans were watching at the same time. The growth over the Season 2 numbers was immense: The Season 2 World Championship was watched by 8.2 million fans, with 1.1 million watching at the same time. This includes global numbers from multiple Internet broadcasts and TV stations in China, Korea and other countries.
Putting this in the context of other popular televised sports, the audience for League of Legends‘ Season 3 finals was roughly equal to the number of viewers that watched the NHL Stanley Cup finals, which had over 5 million viewers on average for the six games in the series, with a peak viewership of 8.16 million.
Still, eSports have some higher targets to aim for. Looking at the most recent figures, the World Series had over 90 million viewers, the Super Bowl had over 108 million viewers, the NBA finals had over 120 million viewers, and the World Cup had over 1 billion viewers. Riot’s got its work cut out for it with Season 4 coming up.
Source: Riot Games
