Tournaments for the West’s Four Biggest Esports Games Generated 190.1 Million Hours of Live Viewership on Twitch and YouTube Gaming
The traditional sports industry has plenty of mega-events and finals that draw in huge crowds and viewership numbers, as well as sponsorship deals with some of the world’s biggest companies. And esports is no different. In fact, it’s bigger now than ever before. Based on live viewership across Twitch and YouTube Gaming in 2018 — measured using our Game Streaming Tracker — tournaments for the four biggest esports games were watched for an impressive 190.1 million hours.
These events were: the League of Legends World Championship Finals 2018; the ELEAGUE Major: Boston (CS:GO); The International 2018 (Dota 2); and the Overwatch League Finals. Excluding the OWL finals (which had its first edition this year), the viewership of these events grew by +6.9% year on year. Below, you can learn more about the top tournaments’ viewership and growth. We also used The Esports Observer’s database (TEO Professional) to dive into the endemic and non-endemic brands that benefited from the popularity of the events.
Please note that the tournaments listed here had the most viewership, per title, on Twitch and YouTube Gaming alone. This does not necessarily mean that they had the highest viewership overall, as other popular streaming platforms such as Facebook, VK, Douya, and Huya etc. are outside of the scope of this data.
Most Viewed on Twitch and YouTube Gaming: League of Legends World Championship Finals
The League of Legends World Championship Finals was 2018’s biggest tournament by live hours watched across Twitch and YouTube Gaming, boasting 81.1 million hours watched. Although the event’s viewership decreased slightly from last year, it is worth noting that the event’s quarter-finals took place across two days, compared to four days in 2017. What’s more, viewership for the event’s top Twitch channel (Riot Games) increased. The channel streamed the event for a duration of 304 hours to an average of 93,000 Twitch viewers. Overall, this generated 28.1 million hours of live viewership for the channel — up +11.7% from last year’s numbers.
Many brands, all partners of the LoL World Championship Finals 2018, benefited from the event’s massive viewership. Mastercard hosted a pop-up fan experience at the event “Mastercard Nexus”, which featured an opportunity for fans to try a shareable AR experience, play an exclusive game mode (Snowdown Showdown 1v1), meet pros and teams, and more. This is an example of a non-endemic brand catering to the esports community via engaging content. The company was also a presenting partner during the opening ceremony of the Grand Finals. Other non-endemic brand State Farm and endemic brands Acer and Maxnomic had spectator ad spots at the tournament.
Biggest Year-on-Year Viewership Growth: ELEAGUE Major: Boston
Out of the four events, the ELEAGUE Major: Boston was the second-most-viewed tournament (by esports hours), pulling in 54.1 million hours watched across Twitch and YouTube Gaming, up from 42.7 million hours for last year’s Atlanta event — a massive year-on-year increase of +26.8%. ELEAGUE TV, of course, was the event’s top Twitch channel, making up the majority (38.7 million hours) of its live viewership. Across Twitch and YouTube Gaming, it was the top-viewed esports channel during the duration of any of the four top events. Also, the ELEAGUE Major: Boston had the most average viewers of any of the top events at 173,000. However, the event’s duration was relatively short (224 hours), so it did not take the top spot for overall viewership. The event’s endemic sponsors were Alienware, Maxnomic, and HyperX, but it was also sponsored by non-endemic brands Boost Mobile, Cheez-It Grooves, and the U.S. Airforce.
High Viewership and High Growth: The International 2018
The International 2018 was just behind the ELEAGUE Major in terms of viewership hours, with a total of 49.3 million hours watched across YouTube Gaming and Twitch, compared to 43.9 million hours last year (+12.3% year on year). The event’s top Twitch channel was dota2ti, which pulled in 19.5 million live hours watched. The stream lasted 236 hours, meaning the channel had 83,000 average concurrent viewers. The International 2018’s three sponsors were all endemic: NVIDIA GeForce, Maxnomic, and Stratz.
Promising First Finals: Overwatch League Finals
The first edition of the Overwatch League Finals was the fourth-most-popular event out of the four, with 5.6 million hours watched across Twitch and YouTube Gaming. The vast majority of these hours came from the official Overwatch League Twitch channel, which generated 4.5 million viewership hours. Interestingly, the Overwatch League claims one of the industry’s biggest media-rights deals to date, with Twitch paying a reported $90 million for the two-year deal. The Overwatch League Finals’ official partners were endemic brands Intel and OMEN by HP, and non-endemic brand T-Mobile, which was the MVP presenter. Sour Patch Kids and Toyota partnered with the event too, with the former taking a long commercial spot. Dolby, Cheez-It Grooves, and Spotify also had commercial spots at the event.
Newzoo’s Game Streaming Tracker
Looking to track the world’s most viewed games, identify top streamers, or pinpoint esports heroes? Newzoo’s Game Streaming Tracker offers the most comprehensive overview of the game-streaming market. Updated daily, the tracker includes instant insights on the number of hours watched, hours broadcast, and the average number of viewers for various metrics, such as games, esports broadcasters, streamers, publishers, and genres.
Uniquely, games and channels are tagged according to their genres and publishers, while content is flagged as esports using machine-learning algorithms. Esports channels are then manually tagged and consist of channels that stream exclusively esports content. For YouTube, only the top 100 channels for each game within a given time are taken into account.
We built the tracker to provide users new to the space with immediate insights and context while giving experienced game-streaming experts the ability to drill down into granular insights.
Want to know more? Contact Fabrice Zaumseil, fabrice@newzoo.com, to request a demo of our Game Streaming Tracker.
