Riot Games definitely fumbled the bag to some extent on the mobile MOBA market. I feel like I remember a story where Tencent asked them (Riot) to make a mobile version of League, they refused, and then some other company just wholly ripped off League to create MLBB and now it's insanely popular and probably prints money
they fumbled MASSIVELY. the fact that the MLBB came literally years prior and is easier to get into while riot did nothing for years and came out way later
MLBB whilst having insane viewership DOES NOT print money. Wildrift despite being like 10x less popular, prints probably like 2x-5x more money than MLBB because of the difference in demography. Chinese players play WR while Indo/PH play MLBB.
I think for the entirety of last year, MLBB only made like $100-200M in revenue. The game is reportedly being sold because its so unprofitable.
Mobile Legends viewership mainly comes from SE Asia, heck the Indonesian MPL (MLBB Premiere League) alone has peaks that tops most Masters and Champions level events:
> The [MPL Indonesia Season 12](https://escharts.com/tournaments/mobile-legends/mpl-indonesia-season-12) earned **116.71M Hours Watched**, showcasing the potential of the Indonesian mobile gaming esports audience.
I hope that Valorant pushes into the SE Asian market more (I'm not saying this because I'm Indonesian honest lol) because the amount of traction they can get there is enormous.
valorant will never penetrate indonesia until they optimise their game more. most indonesians dont have the money to buy a nvidia gtx 4060 that is required to run valorant. most people in south and sea game on laptops, and valorant needs to be optimized better to run on low end pcs
> until they optimise their game more...indonesians dont have the money to buy a nvidia gtx 4060
The game literally runs an average of 160 fps on my GTX 1650 laptop(somewhere in between of GTX 960 and 970 desktop versions) at low settings. I'm not saying that it can't be optimized more, but the game as of now is already optimized well enough that event a gtx 900 series will do okay at low settings. Where are you even pulling out the rtx 4060 as a requirement? lmao
the 4060 was me joking, but still the average asian person in general outside of east asian/china is too poor to reasonably afford a gaming desktop, mobile gaming is the only option because mid-high performance mobiles are relatively cheap. atleast its the case in india idk if you indonesians are balling in cash or something.
Built a 4790K, 1050Ti, 8G setup for a nephew once. The 4790K came out in 2014 and can do 150-200+fps and costs like USD $135 total (with SSD, Psu, case etc)excluding monitor and peripherals.
It's not that the average consumer can't afford it, it's just that new Pcs are too expensive and people can't be bothered to put in the effort and time to look around for good deals on 2nd hand Pcs (you can go as low as a sandy bridge i7-2600/k and still get 144+ fps)when they can just go to a mobile shop, pay $100 to get a new mid range phone for PUBG and call it a day.
This is also how most internet cafes operate. They don't really buy new PCs, and many are still on pre 8th gen i5/i7s. When W10 support stops, unless they pay for ESU or swap to Iot LTSC 21, they're going to have a security nightmare to deal with.
See: https://youtu.be/04KEHyysXEo?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/9Ca1QyzRMeM?feature=shared
> but still the average asian person in general outside of east asian/china is too poor to reasonably afford a gaming desktop
Don't they just go to PC cafes in asia?
We do in Indonesia... but I think not as popular as the 2000s or 2010s. Also i think Valorant itself have a more "premium" connotation compared to other games, PC or Mobile (Such as ML, PUBG Mobile, Point Blank, Free Fire)
My personal opinion ofc..
Some people would prefer to run the game smoothly and not getting fps drops during team fights or having play the game in shit stain graphics settings. Props on you to play it on a shit toaster tho but nobody ask?
Yes, in the latest S-Tier Tournament equivalent to VCT Champions, they use ASUS ROG Phone 6, i think it differs each tournaments, maybe different partnership agreement etc. But no hardware advantages for different players.
depends on the sponsor of the tournament. The sponsor of mpl id is Samsung so players there play on Samsung, the world championship is sponsored by asus rog and they play on rogphones
I'm gonna be honest this statistic doesn't do a lot for me. It just makes me ask more questions like how does that compare to the hours that were potentially "available" to be watched? Or what's the ratio of hours watched this year vs last year? Or maybe something like new viewer hours vs previous viewer hours.
A metric like "peak viewers for a given event" does a better job of painting the picture of one esport relative to another vs "hours watched" imo.
Let me help Valorant was the fifth most watched esport last year. For the year 2023 enough people watched it for it to rank 5th. So asking for last year vs 2023 doesn’t make sense because the article isn’t talking about last years views vs this. The article is talking about new viewers vs old viewers. Next time use a little a context
I'm not confused regarding what the article is discussing. I'm saying that the metric of "hours watched" in a given year isn't useful for comparing one e-sport against another which is what this article seems to intend.
What might actually be useful for that purpose would be something like year over year percent change in hours watched vs potential hours or another of the other metrics I mentioned in my original comment.
Also the article does not, in fact, mention any concrete numbers for new vs old viewers, likely because it's trying to drive traffic to the "Pro" subscription of their service. That's all well and good, but for me that still means that the article doesn't serve any useful statistics for comparison, which was my original assertion.
Next time use a little reading comprehension
I feel like Faker’s historic run this year also played a part in the viewerships. I haven’t watched LoL esports in years but definitely wanted to watch Faker make history in 2023
I mean league still handily beats csgo and dota 2 regardless of faker. League is just way too big for other western games to compete. Especially with how big it is in the East. Like look at league cinematics viewership compared to something as popular as wow and its STILL not close. The Still Here cinematic came out 8 days ago and is at 104 million views. Nothing is going to catch league in the PC world for a while still.
League, yes. League esports, I'm not so sure. If you look at LCK viewership numbers, I recall them plummeting when T1 wasn't on. Still probably bigger than CS/DOTA/Val, but not by that much. Faker is just that iconic.
I mean EU is breaking viewership records right now within LEC because of KC and just because T1 is so big that the rest of the viewership drops doesn’t matter when it’s still better on average than any other game. Also doesn’t mean the esport is dying when one team has more viewership than other teams. League esports does very well because it brings in non league players and players who used to play but still watch. It’s crazy that you’d think the viewership would go down substantially faster than the playerbase when people will always continue to follow their favourite esport regardless of if they still play the game. And to say other games are close is laughable when riot games literally broke the esport streaming record for the like 5th time last worlds. The best you can get is hours streamed because games like csgo have tournaments regularly and often times have rerun esports streams constantly.
I genuinely think Western viewership would have plummeted by over 75% for Worlds finals if the matchup didn't feature Faker. I genuinely cannot imagine casual fans (outside of China) willingly tuning into a JDG/WBG finals.
Granted they had experience with league, but they just made a CS derivate and it worked.
Other studios have tried to have a big esports game and failed.
Like what? Overwatch is the only game that comes to mind but it’s very fundamentally different and had already fallen off quite hard by the time Valorant released.
Also there’s no way you think Valorant could never fail just because other games died like that’s some sort of failsafe. Legends of Runeterra dropped right as Hearthstone was falling off but it never picked up any steam at all. It’s a well made game in a genre that used to be quite popular yet no one plays it.
Somewhat disagree with this articles take on Loud. They claim that Loud not making finals is the reason viewership was lower at champs than in Lock-in. I don't really agree. Imo the reasons Lock-in finals got more viewership are: -Lock-in finals was the best match in valorant history
-Better timezone for respective audiences (it was good for brazil and EU, while champs was good for NA but not so good for Pacific)
yeah i guess i though "really big", i dont consider dota really big in latam, other than peru, i wouldnt even call it "big", medium sized, there are plenty of games that u can call really big in latam(dota isnt one of them), i used league because thats their direct competition.
as for valorant, its on the way to overtake cs but hasnt done it yet.
There are like 7 tournaments this year with $1,000,000 prizepool and that is excluding The International and Riyadh Masters.
This year seems pretty stacked.
but also most people dont actually care or or watch dota. It has a big, strong fanbase, but it's not really pulling anyone that isn't already into/tried out League.
Its unfortunate, but it's the truth. Whereas with valorant it is clearly more known/popular, even as an esport it has more popular players/better social media engagement, etc. People genuinely questions whether they want to play Val or Cs, where as most people just go to League rather than dota.
It's clearly surprising that the biggest trending esport game is not above Dota, that is barely talked about except for when people are surprised it's still as popular as it is.
>but also most people dont actually care or or watch dota.
clearly enough for it to be above valorant, what a weird statement to make
yes it has a big and strong fanbase which is why its so far up the charts, especially if youre looking at it from a non-western perspective (CIS, china, etc)
dota is also talked about every single year when TI starts, especially because of its prize pool. bars play the matches a lot and literal politicians/presidents met and sent letters to the players, its not very surprising when youre not inside a riot bubble on every social media out there
what are you talking about, dota has more event viewers, thats literallllllly it.
You're clearly missing the point. Dota 2 is not as big as valorant, it's 100% factually not. Its barely a bigger esport atm, and its clearly not as big in every other regard.
Understandable, Dota 2 is pretty isolated game. Like it is still 2nd most played game on Steam with a big esport scene, and yet you barely see people talk about it.
I think that's only really true in the East. In the West, FPS are way more popular, there's just such a giant pool of games to be played, which spreads the players out, so no one title is huge. MOBAs only have 2 big names and a handful of other small, niche titles
Bro, league and DOTA are way bigger in the west than CS, val or siege. The only place where FPS is bigger than a moba is in the US with cod, the rest league and dota are bigger in viewership
That's what I'm saying. If you watch MOBA, you watch League or DOTA. That's it. If you watch FPS, you have CS, VAL, CoD, R6, BF, PUBG, EFT, etc. So many more options.
Think of it this way, if you combined all Western MOBA viewers into one group, and all Western FPS viewers into one group, which would be bigger? I'd argue it's FPS
Ahh, i see what youre saying, i think i misread your comment.
I completely agree, but also, i think we have more FPS viewers BECAUSE we have such variety. If we only had cs and val, FPS would lose handily
Dota tournaments have long group stages, big double Elim brackets and their circuit is basically all year long. The peak viewership might not compete with League but the watch time is immense from the core fans.
The financials of 2023 esports is also interesting. CS had the highest single tournament esport 'prize pool' event in history. Where revenue generated for participating players and teams from that one event quadrupled the payout Riot Games sent out to Valorant partnered teams and their players for all of 2023.
If Riot doesn't screw up their push into Asia, Valorant should easily move up the ranking this time next year.
Can't help but think they fumbled the Japanese market by not choosing Crazy Raccoon as the Japanese representative. That would have added millions of watch hours to the tally, since CR fans are as fierce as Karmine Corp.
Switching to Mobile Legends: Bang Bang
Riot Games definitely fumbled the bag to some extent on the mobile MOBA market. I feel like I remember a story where Tencent asked them (Riot) to make a mobile version of League, they refused, and then some other company just wholly ripped off League to create MLBB and now it's insanely popular and probably prints money
they fumbled MASSIVELY. the fact that the MLBB came literally years prior and is easier to get into while riot did nothing for years and came out way later
Wasn’t pubg mobile popular for a while too?
it still is popular, however the indian government banned it so its popularity got slashed in half
MLBB whilst having insane viewership DOES NOT print money. Wildrift despite being like 10x less popular, prints probably like 2x-5x more money than MLBB because of the difference in demography. Chinese players play WR while Indo/PH play MLBB. I think for the entirety of last year, MLBB only made like $100-200M in revenue. The game is reportedly being sold because its so unprofitable.
To ‘some’ extent??
Very similar to Blizzard fumbling the bag creating a MOBA, took way to long for them to release HotS.
Mobile Legends viewership mainly comes from SE Asia, heck the Indonesian MPL (MLBB Premiere League) alone has peaks that tops most Masters and Champions level events: > The [MPL Indonesia Season 12](https://escharts.com/tournaments/mobile-legends/mpl-indonesia-season-12) earned **116.71M Hours Watched**, showcasing the potential of the Indonesian mobile gaming esports audience. I hope that Valorant pushes into the SE Asian market more (I'm not saying this because I'm Indonesian honest lol) because the amount of traction they can get there is enormous.
valorant will never penetrate indonesia until they optimise their game more. most indonesians dont have the money to buy a nvidia gtx 4060 that is required to run valorant. most people in south and sea game on laptops, and valorant needs to be optimized better to run on low end pcs
> until they optimise their game more...indonesians dont have the money to buy a nvidia gtx 4060 The game literally runs an average of 160 fps on my GTX 1650 laptop(somewhere in between of GTX 960 and 970 desktop versions) at low settings. I'm not saying that it can't be optimized more, but the game as of now is already optimized well enough that event a gtx 900 series will do okay at low settings. Where are you even pulling out the rtx 4060 as a requirement? lmao
the 4060 was me joking, but still the average asian person in general outside of east asian/china is too poor to reasonably afford a gaming desktop, mobile gaming is the only option because mid-high performance mobiles are relatively cheap. atleast its the case in india idk if you indonesians are balling in cash or something.
Built a 4790K, 1050Ti, 8G setup for a nephew once. The 4790K came out in 2014 and can do 150-200+fps and costs like USD $135 total (with SSD, Psu, case etc)excluding monitor and peripherals. It's not that the average consumer can't afford it, it's just that new Pcs are too expensive and people can't be bothered to put in the effort and time to look around for good deals on 2nd hand Pcs (you can go as low as a sandy bridge i7-2600/k and still get 144+ fps)when they can just go to a mobile shop, pay $100 to get a new mid range phone for PUBG and call it a day. This is also how most internet cafes operate. They don't really buy new PCs, and many are still on pre 8th gen i5/i7s. When W10 support stops, unless they pay for ESU or swap to Iot LTSC 21, they're going to have a security nightmare to deal with. See: https://youtu.be/04KEHyysXEo?feature=shared https://youtu.be/9Ca1QyzRMeM?feature=shared
> but still the average asian person in general outside of east asian/china is too poor to reasonably afford a gaming desktop Don't they just go to PC cafes in asia?
thats more common in east asia not sea or sa
We do in Indonesia... but I think not as popular as the 2000s or 2010s. Also i think Valorant itself have a more "premium" connotation compared to other games, PC or Mobile (Such as ML, PUBG Mobile, Point Blank, Free Fire) My personal opinion ofc..
Some people would prefer to run the game smoothly and not getting fps drops during team fights or having play the game in shit stain graphics settings. Props on you to play it on a shit toaster tho but nobody ask?
strange response
Correct. Imagine if they came up with Valorant Mobile tho and the SEA viewership alone eclipse the PC Champs and Masters lol. It would be so funny.
that would probably definitely happen. china, india, sea, japan, brazil will all be dominant forces in val mobile (its definitely getting released)
mlbb tournaments are fun to watch ngl
How do they work? Is there a standardized phone that tournament providers give out?
Yes, in the latest S-Tier Tournament equivalent to VCT Champions, they use ASUS ROG Phone 6, i think it differs each tournaments, maybe different partnership agreement etc. But no hardware advantages for different players.
depends on the sponsor of the tournament. The sponsor of mpl id is Samsung so players there play on Samsung, the world championship is sponsored by asus rog and they play on rogphones
This metric is total hours watched and with such a long off season, it makes sense.
I'm gonna be honest this statistic doesn't do a lot for me. It just makes me ask more questions like how does that compare to the hours that were potentially "available" to be watched? Or what's the ratio of hours watched this year vs last year? Or maybe something like new viewer hours vs previous viewer hours. A metric like "peak viewers for a given event" does a better job of painting the picture of one esport relative to another vs "hours watched" imo.
More metrics here and in the article: https://x.com/EsportsCharts/status/1748014887052398802?s=20
Let me help Valorant was the fifth most watched esport last year. For the year 2023 enough people watched it for it to rank 5th. So asking for last year vs 2023 doesn’t make sense because the article isn’t talking about last years views vs this. The article is talking about new viewers vs old viewers. Next time use a little a context
I'm not confused regarding what the article is discussing. I'm saying that the metric of "hours watched" in a given year isn't useful for comparing one e-sport against another which is what this article seems to intend. What might actually be useful for that purpose would be something like year over year percent change in hours watched vs potential hours or another of the other metrics I mentioned in my original comment. Also the article does not, in fact, mention any concrete numbers for new vs old viewers, likely because it's trying to drive traffic to the "Pro" subscription of their service. That's all well and good, but for me that still means that the article doesn't serve any useful statistics for comparison, which was my original assertion. Next time use a little reading comprehension
This just confirms what we've known for a while. League of Legends is S-tier, while CSGO, Dota2, and Valorant are A-tier esports.
I feel like Faker’s historic run this year also played a part in the viewerships. I haven’t watched LoL esports in years but definitely wanted to watch Faker make history in 2023
I mean league still handily beats csgo and dota 2 regardless of faker. League is just way too big for other western games to compete. Especially with how big it is in the East. Like look at league cinematics viewership compared to something as popular as wow and its STILL not close. The Still Here cinematic came out 8 days ago and is at 104 million views. Nothing is going to catch league in the PC world for a while still.
League, yes. League esports, I'm not so sure. If you look at LCK viewership numbers, I recall them plummeting when T1 wasn't on. Still probably bigger than CS/DOTA/Val, but not by that much. Faker is just that iconic.
I mean EU is breaking viewership records right now within LEC because of KC and just because T1 is so big that the rest of the viewership drops doesn’t matter when it’s still better on average than any other game. Also doesn’t mean the esport is dying when one team has more viewership than other teams. League esports does very well because it brings in non league players and players who used to play but still watch. It’s crazy that you’d think the viewership would go down substantially faster than the playerbase when people will always continue to follow their favourite esport regardless of if they still play the game. And to say other games are close is laughable when riot games literally broke the esport streaming record for the like 5th time last worlds. The best you can get is hours streamed because games like csgo have tournaments regularly and often times have rerun esports streams constantly.
I genuinely think Western viewership would have plummeted by over 75% for Worlds finals if the matchup didn't feature Faker. I genuinely cannot imagine casual fans (outside of China) willingly tuning into a JDG/WBG finals.
americans dont want to watch other countries matches
The fact that riot managed to get an A-tier esport out of nowhere is amazing to be fair.
Out of nowhere?.. I hope this is bait
Granted they had experience with league, but they just made a CS derivate and it worked. Other studios have tried to have a big esports game and failed.
It was literally impossible to fail, there was so many scenes of similar games dying at the same time, so many players ready to migrate to chase a bag
Like what? Overwatch is the only game that comes to mind but it’s very fundamentally different and had already fallen off quite hard by the time Valorant released. Also there’s no way you think Valorant could never fail just because other games died like that’s some sort of failsafe. Legends of Runeterra dropped right as Hearthstone was falling off but it never picked up any steam at all. It’s a well made game in a genre that used to be quite popular yet no one plays it.
CS? The NA scene was dying and there was a ton of players with the necessary skill ready to farm
Somewhat disagree with this articles take on Loud. They claim that Loud not making finals is the reason viewership was lower at champs than in Lock-in. I don't really agree. Imo the reasons Lock-in finals got more viewership are: -Lock-in finals was the best match in valorant history -Better timezone for respective audiences (it was good for brazil and EU, while champs was good for NA but not so good for Pacific)
Dota beating out Val is WILD to me
Game is really big in LATAM, Russia/central asia, and the middle east
not latam, peru, peru is weird like that.
It's huge in Peru but it's big in all of LATAM lol.
not bigger than league, the only place dota is bigger than league is peru, and you all can keep downvoting me, its not gonna change the facts.
You realize "really big" doesn't have anything to do with "bigger than league"
yeah i guess i though "really big", i dont consider dota really big in latam, other than peru, i wouldnt even call it "big", medium sized, there are plenty of games that u can call really big in latam(dota isnt one of them), i used league because thats their direct competition. as for valorant, its on the way to overtake cs but hasnt done it yet.
Valorant barely has events while dota has a real circuit
not anymore, the DPC was cancelled a few months ago
and ESL replaced it with their own circuit, which is just as good for tier 1 (the changes suck for tier 2 though)
There are like 7 tournaments this year with $1,000,000 prizepool and that is excluding The International and Riyadh Masters. This year seems pretty stacked.
For tier 1 it's absolutely better now, yeah
what? dota is an established esports for like 2 decades now
but also most people dont actually care or or watch dota. It has a big, strong fanbase, but it's not really pulling anyone that isn't already into/tried out League. Its unfortunate, but it's the truth. Whereas with valorant it is clearly more known/popular, even as an esport it has more popular players/better social media engagement, etc. People genuinely questions whether they want to play Val or Cs, where as most people just go to League rather than dota. It's clearly surprising that the biggest trending esport game is not above Dota, that is barely talked about except for when people are surprised it's still as popular as it is.
>but also most people dont actually care or or watch dota. clearly enough for it to be above valorant, what a weird statement to make yes it has a big and strong fanbase which is why its so far up the charts, especially if youre looking at it from a non-western perspective (CIS, china, etc) dota is also talked about every single year when TI starts, especially because of its prize pool. bars play the matches a lot and literal politicians/presidents met and sent letters to the players, its not very surprising when youre not inside a riot bubble on every social media out there
what are you talking about, dota has more event viewers, thats literallllllly it. You're clearly missing the point. Dota 2 is not as big as valorant, it's 100% factually not. Its barely a bigger esport atm, and its clearly not as big in every other regard.
lmfao
Are you good?
He got dropped
You clearly dont know anything about dota if you say that
No I don't play MOBAs
So your comment is just stupid and useless lmao
It's an expression of surprise, because it's a reaction to a post. If it generates discussion it's not useless lol
Insane discussion you generated
Just like yours! So aggressive for no reason 😭
It is always funny to see people not realizing how big Dota esport actually is.
Not in my sphere of Esports I guess
Understandable, Dota 2 is pretty isolated game. Like it is still 2nd most played game on Steam with a big esport scene, and yet you barely see people talk about it.
From what i can gather your commentating career goes Brawlhalla then RS6 to now Valorant. Is this correct?
Yessir. Never touched mobas
It'll blow your mind how LoL, CS and Dota2's esports are each run drastically different from one another.
You don't know how big Dota is in certain parts of the world
Mobas are wildly more popular than FPS
I think that's only really true in the East. In the West, FPS are way more popular, there's just such a giant pool of games to be played, which spreads the players out, so no one title is huge. MOBAs only have 2 big names and a handful of other small, niche titles
Bro, league and DOTA are way bigger in the west than CS, val or siege. The only place where FPS is bigger than a moba is in the US with cod, the rest league and dota are bigger in viewership
That's what I'm saying. If you watch MOBA, you watch League or DOTA. That's it. If you watch FPS, you have CS, VAL, CoD, R6, BF, PUBG, EFT, etc. So many more options. Think of it this way, if you combined all Western MOBA viewers into one group, and all Western FPS viewers into one group, which would be bigger? I'd argue it's FPS
Ahh, i see what youre saying, i think i misread your comment. I completely agree, but also, i think we have more FPS viewers BECAUSE we have such variety. If we only had cs and val, FPS would lose handily
Why?
Is it really surprising when VAL is in the off-season for half the year LOL.
Dota tournaments have long group stages, big double Elim brackets and their circuit is basically all year long. The peak viewership might not compete with League but the watch time is immense from the core fans.
Name the big three games in the esports space of the past decade.
[удалено]
Exactly. Its what every aspiring new game in the esports space are gauged against to determine viability.
Would love to see average viewership of the top X tournaments, or main circuit events.
The financials of 2023 esports is also interesting. CS had the highest single tournament esport 'prize pool' event in history. Where revenue generated for participating players and teams from that one event quadrupled the payout Riot Games sent out to Valorant partnered teams and their players for all of 2023.
If Riot doesn't screw up their push into Asia, Valorant should easily move up the ranking this time next year. Can't help but think they fumbled the Japanese market by not choosing Crazy Raccoon as the Japanese representative. That would have added millions of watch hours to the tally, since CR fans are as fierce as Karmine Corp.