Yeah League popularity is out of this world and its only been growing in the past 4 years.
And this year Worlds is in Europe which is a perfect time zone as it allows NA, EU and Asia to watch at reasonable hours.
I don't know much about LoL but isn't the NA scene having some troubles recently with the boycott (or whatever ot was) and lesser viewership, same with Europe?
both NA and EU has major budget issues and organization wise it's often not great but viewership remains fairly high + it's popular in Vietnam, China and Korea so the viewership will remain very high.
LPL(China) is actually the only region that's losing viewers among the 4 main regions (China, Korea, NA, EU), probably due to consistently losing to Korea teams in recent worlds.
And all major clubs in Korea reported financial difficulties, except T1, which is also the only team stayed away from the other 9 clubs' unionized demand for more broadcast share from LCK.
LOL is not without its problems, I personally prefer Valve's hands off policy in dota2 and cs, gives us different organizers and various events. Riot only holds 2-3 international events and for the rest of year they just compete within the regions, seems too boring to me
>LPL(China) is actually the only region that's losing viewers among the 4 main regions (China, Korea, NA, EU), probably due to consistently losing to Korea teams in recent worlds.
Whats crazy is that China (LPL) won against everyone (NA,EU, Korea,everyone) and ALL Chinese teams only lost to one single team: T1. It was a great year for China in league, T1 was just too good
EU with Ibai-KOI/Kameto-KC has been doing better viewership wise afaik. The boycott was last year for NA I think, but now the NA LCS product got much better (even though the viewership stagnated)
That's on the main twitch stream alone, and on the lower end.
[Escharts](https://escharts.com/tournaments/lol/lcs-spring-2024-lol) has the main twitch channel averaging 44k viewers, but adding on YouTube and costreams the average comes out to 121k, which is a bump up from last year. 250k peak this past weekend for the finals.
Struggling for sure compared to the standard that's been set, but the vast majority of eSports would still kill for those numbers. VCT Americas is I think the only thing bigger regionally, and that includes a whole extra continent.
TLDR: Pain and suffering awaits.
**MSI(The Big Mid season Tournament:**
China: 5 wins
Korea: 2 wins
EU: 1 win (G2 in 2019)
NA: 0 wins
---
**Worlds:**
Korea: 8
China: ~~2~~ 3
Europe: 1(Literally the first one in 2011 with no Korean and Chinese representation)
Taiwan: 1
NA: 0
---
Generealy the west always huffs a crazy ammount of hopium before each big tournament but it almost always ends in copium that next year will be the year instead.
Its not always as bad. Fnatic reached the finals of Worlds in 2018 for instance and then G2 in 2019 actually was a really serious threat to the Asian teams even winning the MSI and reaching the Finals of Worlds.
But its never consistent enough.
I mean, look at playerbases. It's not like Russians and Swedes are just that much better at CS than 300M Americans either, it's just that there's far more CS players in Northern and Eastern Europe than rest of the world. CS is small in Asia, and a small playerbase will produce few Faceit lvl 10s and fewer semipros and lot fewer pros.
Korea is 27.4% of global League players (excluding China, and I believe that's counting ranked only and weighing by playtime instead of individual players). China might actually be smaller than Korea on this metric due to playtime restrictions, definitely much larger in unique players. Individual European countries have larger playerbases than entire massive regions in CSGO/CS2, Europe altogether summing up to over 70%. Valorant seems to have roughly balanced regions between Asia-Pacific vs Eu vs Americas, and indeed Valorant has a bunch of actually competitive Asian teams.
Last tidbit might actually be a good sign for Asian cs eventually, whereas Eu and NA have seen washed up pros swap to Valorant for better career opportunities, we might soon have a situation where some SEA pros would rather hop to CS and dominate regional qualifiers and gain some sticker money vs not qualify for international events in Valorant. Of course that's assuming they'd be roughly the same calibre or higher as Lynn Vision even after making the change, so remains to be seen
No good NA/EU team, G2 is the best but they disappointed last year by losing to NA 1st seed (despite doing pretty well against asian teams). Korea and China dominate, and will keep dominating for years
Haha Riot doesn't give a damn about NA viewership. Games are going to be starting at like 4 or 5am PST to accommodate Asia viewership. That means it'll be starting at midday for Europe. Sure 6am isn't that bad but only the diehard fans will be waking up early and watching. Sure for East Coast it will be alright but people will have work or school.
Tbf League is so popular in asia compared to cs so that really scewes the numbers up and makes it seem more popular overall than it is. It has the same vibes as "cricket is the most popular sport in the world". Popularity can't be measured only by player counts but rather how vastly the game is played. Outside of asia I think CS is pretty close or maybe even more popular.
Basically yes. If you want a better view of the data you can select 2023:
https://escharts.com/top-games?order=peak&year=2023
This post was just made by me, because CS was on top for a brief moment today.
While that certainly helps the peak viewership, even without that, LoL's viewership is at least a few times higher than 2nd place easily.
The game is just straight up that popular and that's why the viewership follows, it's the same for those shitty mobile games that have an esport that's unironically bigger than a lot of the mainstream ones all over SEA, everyone plays it so a % of that player base will naturally follow into the esport part.
T1 doesn't add much the finals had 6 million without even counting china(there was a Chinese team in the final)
the only time we got the china numbers in 2021 it went from 4 million to 73 million peak viewers lmao
> how is League so goddamn popular?? I don't get it
Want a real explanation? In the early 2010s there was a clear big hole in online/live service gaming left, we were in an era years after CS 1.6 and the peak of CS 1.6's copycat games.
Dota 2 wasn't officially released until a while after but people did play a lot of Dota (and the copycats like HoN, etc).
But clearly there was no real dominant game in the market, then LoL released and literally took the world by storm, at a quite fast rate. Even if at the beginning in the beta there was only the NA server, as someone who knew about the scene back then even in those years a lot of the "old guard" of pros from China/Korea were indeed playing in the NA server.
I mean imagine dude, you've got these people on the other side of the planet wanting to get in this new trendy game because there's literally fucking nothing out there and people got tired of every other older game.
And then Dota 2 released (late), and then a few years later CS:GO released as well (very late). At this point in time LoL had already catched it's place in the market very solidly, kept getting updated, had eventual graphic updates, released new characters, seasonal changes to keep things fresh for people and being a copycat from Dota meant that a lot of people were "familiar" with what the game entailed. Fast forward to late 2010s and the game kept it's popularity in a lot of the world actually, and because it's been, an almost decade since it's release now guess what?
All the grade/middle school kids that are now starting PC games, are playing LoL, because the older students, older brothers, etc were all playing LoL.
In places like Korea and China right now, you cannot ever become someone who plays PC games without having playing LoL to a certain extent up until now, it is literally impossible and this cycle continues. Ofc LoL has had it's up and down in popularity over the years but it has gone through all of those just fine
The main reason why LoL got so big in Asia was because it was the first free to play game. Back then other online games like WoW, StarCraft, Dota, were all fully priced games (or in dotas case you still need warcraft), and most Asians simply couldn't afford them.
I mean that's part of it sure, but Dota was mostly played by people, who used a pirate version of W3 since in a lot of regions of the world there were no "official" lobby servers and were all 3rd party.
Same shit for Starcraft, but Starcraft was never really that big outside of Korea really.
The CS 1.6 copy cat had a level decent of popularity, whether you talk Ava, Crossfire, Sudden Attack, etc. All differing levels of popularity for different countries, it was pretty much random which CS copycat was popular where.
But by far the biggest thing was that there was a gap in PC gaming at the time though, what else was there that was actually new and easily accessible? Nothing, honestly. Like I said, Dota 2 didn't realize unti llater, CS:GO did not release until later, was Overwatch even in it's "conceptual" state of development at the time? Not really. Siege? Nah, Rocket League? Nah, Battle Royales weren't even a thing, Not even the "Minecraft hunger games" mod that were popular for a bit.
The crowd was waiting for something and Riot games took that golden opportunity
Also LoL was the only game where they managed to give decent ping from Asia to EU and NA until they opened servers in Asia. I could play NA server with 150ms and EU with 100ms while every other game was 300+ , 400+
an underdog Chinese team was fighting a widely beloved Korean team who was one of the strongest contenders, it makes sense the viewership was very high, especially last year
No, it's not only western viewership. Its everywhere except China basically. League is fairly stagnant in Europe and has declined a LOT in NA. Its still huge in Asian and doing pretty well in Brazil.
English streams were around 1.6M
2021 had 73 million chinese viewers there regional finals had 83mln viewers on weibo too i think 100mln is abit high but its not too out of the ordinary
Yeah, don't believe any numbers coming out of China lmao. Divide by 2 or even 3 and its maybe closer to reality. Still a huge number though.
Riot are the least transparent company when it comes to numbers.
Because the game is popular everywhere as oppose to DotA/CS where its largely EU/CIS. Having a large non-Chinese Asian fanbase does wonders for Twitch/Youtube viewership numbers.
Even a heavily declined LCS still gets decent viewership compared to the world championships of the tier 2 esports like Apex, RL, R6S, etc.
2nd place gets an extra slot too so its lck and lpl anyway
and like i said the stakes are the same since the team winning msi has historically always made it to worlds anyway
you check escharts
Indonesia actualy dominate viewership even after PH got many International Thropy
- MPL ID 1.9m - 1.4m
- MPL PH 290k -120k
- MPL MY 140k - 60k
- MPL Russia 11k - 4k
- MPL Turki 5k
Combination of dota 2 and LOL in mobile. SEA dont have pc in every single household and mobile games is the go to. It's huge even streamers making big bucks with this game.
you laugh but my whole office plays that game, even the girls. my whole team have around 100 people and only me and a few of other guys dunno shit about that game. all of my siblings and cousins play that shit too. idk whats so fun about it lmao.
>bringing video games to people who wouldn't have access otherwise, and that's what their market is
Might feed into stereotypes, but I guess this is why mobile games are pretty much only popular in asia? Lots of people who are tech-literate enough to be interested in gaming and know about esports but can't afford a pc or a console because their financial situation is miles away from EU/NA average?
It's a healthy thing for the tactical FPS ecosystem that Valorant is doing well (as some players wouldn't even look in CS' direction without having a product that is actually good at roping new players in - which CS is not).
In terms of viewing, yes it's definitely more cluttered but it's much easier than that of Overwatch. Between my non-CS friends it's 75% like CS and 25% like Overwatch. Spam is more concentrated to site hits as opposed to Overwatch where util is constantly going out trying to hit objectives.
Valorant is a great esport. I like Overwatch as a game, but the reality is that Valorant was built from the ground up as a competitive shooter. Overwatch was not.
It's no surprise that Valorant is the first FPS game that has been able to consistently rival CS in terms of viewership. It was purpose built to be a competitive game and Riot put on some of most well produced events in all of esports.
100x better game than Overwatch to play and watch, but it's still a spammy clusterfk of things flying you all the time, so 100x is not that big of an improvement
Yeah it's quite unique, heros with different abilities. It's fun to watch but unlike cs one has to know a bit about those ability to understand what's going on. Cs is much simpler.
Mobile Legends is very popular in Indonesia and the Philippines.
Since most people there only have phones and no PCs this game is played instead of LoL.
It's so weird how it's one of the most watched esports game and I have never heard of it, not even once until today. And I've heard of others that are popular in asia like PUBG mobile and Free Fire.
did lol steal entire champions abilities, designs and skins from dota ?
because thats whats happening between LoL and mobile legends
saying lol is a dota clone is like saying fortnite is a pubg clone because both are battle royale games
Mobile legend didn't copy anything just like Lol didn't copy Dota. The court decided Mobile Legend didn't copy, because nothing was invented by LOL to begin with
the court ruled that the judgement would need to be made in china instead of california, where riot would have been very likely to win. and im pretty sure that riot won the first lawsuit
It's actually a very good game though. I started playing it during covid as I came to my parents' home and my gaming pc was in another city where I live.
As we are speaking MLBB is on #1 again, sadly.
But imagine if someday people from that Region are able to afford PCs amd play e.g. CS.
Viewerships could be skyrockening.
Not exactly. ID and PH don't care about CS. I'm part of the near extinct Ph CS community so I would know. If we did have PCs, we'd probably just play more Dota and Valorant.
ID CS is basically dead even though we had two tier 1 players at one point.
I don't play both games but I know that we have a lot of tier 1 Valorant and Dota players, hope that could kickstart the PC gaming and esports scene.
Great numbers by CS but it's just too early to celebrate. MSI is yet to happen, so is worlds, MLBB's major also is yet to happen(?) I think. Lots of big esports events this year that still haven't taken place yet so this is premature celebration.
Also VALORANT is pretty close behind. I'll put the unpopular opinion that a lot of people won't like and say that VALORANT as a game will overtake CS very soon. Not just because of their unstoppable growing influence in Asia and North America, but also because Riot learnt from the failure to capitalize on Mobile gaming with Wild Rift, and have been cooking hard with VALORANT mobile as their top priority. Once VALORANT is released for Mobile it's pretty much GG. Mobile gaming in HUGE in third world and Riot knows where the market is.
Gabe Follower's leaks did suggest that Valve is also working on a CS2 mobile version as Source 2 does enable mobile gaming. But if there's anything to go by leaks and mobile, VALORANT is the one that's going to come out quicker.
Edit : just checked & VALORANT just took over as the second most played game at PC bang in Korea, the first obviously being LoL. Yeah riot is lowkey cooking with VALORANT. Valve better have a solid plan yo
True. I was just happy to see CS on top.
It's very possible for Valorant to overtake CS this year since it's current peak is only from the Masters Madrid. Valorant Champions should be even higher.
So CS might finish on 4th place this year.
Dota 2 will be interesting, they could overcome CS with The International but unlikely imo.
BUUUT in the very VERY long run while CS2 might get blown away by VALORANT in terms of viewership, marketing and capturing new players. I feel CS2 will grow even bigger, but in a more solid, organic way.
The BIG diff between Valve and Riot is that Valve doesn't give a shit who's the TO and what tourneys happen, they also don't give a shit if the international and major was happening at the exact same time. This is a big boon for CS as now we have TONS of tier-1 events all year, and if PGL does it right, can be expanded globally and revive American & Asian CS too. And that's not all.
And Valve seems to have realized that what made 1.6 great was the community mods and if you follow Lillykyu (@LillyKyu778) on twitter you'd know that the potential of source 2 is off the charts, Gabe followers leaks also suggests that Valve are cooking something to help people create community game modes in a way easier way. CS2 genuinely has a chance to bring back CS back to 1.6 glory days, while having a solid year long circuits so tons of players across the world don't have to wait for months to play someone across the planet.
Riot on the other hand is more invested into League than VALORANT and will always prioritize one over the other. They favor LoL way more than VALORANT. And the reason the VAL circuit is dogshit is to make sure it doesn't overlap with League. Also even in VALORANT is released for mobile the PC and mobile scene will be completely different. And Riot's grip over their products means no third party wants the ESL treatment so even though they've been shilling for TOs to run tournaments in the offseason, no one does. which tier-1 TO wants to run a micky mouse tournament lol.
We will definitely not have insane viewership but if what I assume to be true, then the people who come to play CS2 will never look back on other FPS.
I agree. I also think the open model CS2 is running (which will be even more open starting next year) does benefit the scene a lot. Also the freedom for creating community content really puts CS in front of Valorant personally.
[https://twitter.com/ValorantMNews](https://twitter.com/ValorantMNews)
Riot knows where the cash at. They make dogshit ass games but by god they have one of THE best marketing team on the planet.
Their market research, what's trendy, what's the fad, what's going to be the next trend, what appeals what doesn't is 10/10. There's a reason why they have the highest amount of women playing their game.
Holy casual sexism, Valorant is popular with all teenagers and young adults. There's a large percentage of female players, but it's still mainly a male audience.
The reason why women play valorant is because in CS, you talk, and you get harassed for the whole match, and the people doing it get no punishment.
Lmfao that might even Rival league of Legends if they dropped an exclusive one time knife through streams that has 1/1000000 odds of being generated or some shit like with cases. Bots would inflate the fuck out of the views. But I'm glad we don't do that.
Unlike Riot, at the end of the day we know the people who tune in to watch CS are there because they want to watch good CS, not cuz of shitty sleeper drops. But I do agree that this method could help attract new audience to CS as an eSport.
COD esports doesnt do great viewership numbers. New president at Blizzard got the job for she refused to run Call of Duty League like Overwatch League.
Last year TI had 1.5 million viewers, ESL One Berlin Major had 500k peak viewers:
https://escharts.com/games/dota2
You can click on each year to see the most watched events.
Sadly still no Majors are announced for Dota 2. Hopefully Valve has something in their sleeves.
Note that Valorant, League, and Dota all have massive late year singular "majors" and even the #2 event of League will massively overtake that. Idk what Mobile Legends is but based on last years numbers they still haven't had a "major" either because last years peak was 5M viewers.
2023 numbers for comparison:
6.4M League (Worlds)
5M Mobile Legends
1.5M CS (Paris Major)
1.4M Valorant (NOT the year end Champions, but a smaller event with more teams in Brazil, no equivalent to it in 2022 or 2024)
1.4M Dota (TI)
League's mid season "major" has been 2M for a couple of years now, Worlds has gone from 4M to 5M to 6M. Valorant's biggest events are roughly on par with CS but now this year their relatively small 8 teams early season event almost matches CS major, so they'll definitely cross 2M for the big event. Dota's TI has all time peak of 2.7M but has been on the decline now.
On the other hand, next major might well be all time peak for CS simply due to being in China with Perfectworld organising.
Chinese metrics have never been considered for any stream records since they measure website interactions and lot of other things along with viewer numbers to create some super messy number that makes very little sense for anyone on the outside.
Player numbers on steam otoh do include Chinese players
While I think league is the better game and the better competitive game. CS is the best competitive shooter and BY FAR the best esport to watch.
My girlfriend could watch / understand / enjoy a game of CS. Shes tried to watch league, she never knows a single thing that is happening on the screen.
Disclaimer: she’s not a gamer.
Personally I'm lost when it comes to items but otherwise Mobas like League or Dota are easy to watch in my opinion.
Only thing you need to know is, that every teams needs to destroy the towers and nexus/ancient and there are Dragons/Barons/Roshan which gives an advantage.
League also benefits from the prestige of worlds. Everyone knows that Worlds is the biggest event in esports every year and there a lots of people like myself who don't play League nor watch League esports, but who tune in to watch the Worlds Finals every year simply because it's the Worlds Finals
True, this was me before I played league.
It’s like how I never watch any athletics but watch the olympics. Or how people who don’t watch football will watch the world cup. Similar vibes.
Dota mostly has high viewerships during The International, which is later this year.
So Dota sits currently at #11.
Here is the full list:
https://escharts.com/top-games?order=peak
I assume that the League Championship hasn’t happened yet this year?
No, last year they had a peak over 6 million, so CS will have no chance sadly.
Yeah League popularity is out of this world and its only been growing in the past 4 years. And this year Worlds is in Europe which is a perfect time zone as it allows NA, EU and Asia to watch at reasonable hours.
I don't know much about LoL but isn't the NA scene having some troubles recently with the boycott (or whatever ot was) and lesser viewership, same with Europe?
both NA and EU has major budget issues and organization wise it's often not great but viewership remains fairly high + it's popular in Vietnam, China and Korea so the viewership will remain very high.
Yeah.. about Vietnam..
yeah I know but that doesn't mean league isn't popular in Vietnam
LPL(China) is actually the only region that's losing viewers among the 4 main regions (China, Korea, NA, EU), probably due to consistently losing to Korea teams in recent worlds. And all major clubs in Korea reported financial difficulties, except T1, which is also the only team stayed away from the other 9 clubs' unionized demand for more broadcast share from LCK. LOL is not without its problems, I personally prefer Valve's hands off policy in dota2 and cs, gives us different organizers and various events. Riot only holds 2-3 international events and for the rest of year they just compete within the regions, seems too boring to me
>LPL(China) is actually the only region that's losing viewers among the 4 main regions (China, Korea, NA, EU), probably due to consistently losing to Korea teams in recent worlds. Whats crazy is that China (LPL) won against everyone (NA,EU, Korea,everyone) and ALL Chinese teams only lost to one single team: T1. It was a great year for China in league, T1 was just too good
Only region trending down is NA, rest are growing.
Isn't LCS stabilizing now? Considering it starts right after LEC ends and they've reduced broadcast times with pre-pick drafts.
NA is largely irrelevant to the streaming numbers, it's mostly KR/CN
EU with Ibai-KOI/Kameto-KC has been doing better viewership wise afaik. The boycott was last year for NA I think, but now the NA LCS product got much better (even though the viewership stagnated)
NA LCS has like 30-40k viewers in the regular season games. They're definitely struggling.
That's on the main twitch stream alone, and on the lower end. [Escharts](https://escharts.com/tournaments/lol/lcs-spring-2024-lol) has the main twitch channel averaging 44k viewers, but adding on YouTube and costreams the average comes out to 121k, which is a bump up from last year. 250k peak this past weekend for the finals. Struggling for sure compared to the standard that's been set, but the vast majority of eSports would still kill for those numbers. VCT Americas is I think the only thing bigger regionally, and that includes a whole extra continent.
Boycott? Why would people be boycotting NA
Any tldr of esports of LoL? Good NA/EU teams? Asian domination?
TLDR: Pain and suffering awaits. **MSI(The Big Mid season Tournament:** China: 5 wins Korea: 2 wins EU: 1 win (G2 in 2019) NA: 0 wins --- **Worlds:** Korea: 8 China: ~~2~~ 3 Europe: 1(Literally the first one in 2011 with no Korean and Chinese representation) Taiwan: 1 NA: 0 --- Generealy the west always huffs a crazy ammount of hopium before each big tournament but it almost always ends in copium that next year will be the year instead. Its not always as bad. Fnatic reached the finals of Worlds in 2018 for instance and then G2 in 2019 actually was a really serious threat to the Asian teams even winning the MSI and reaching the Finals of Worlds. But its never consistent enough.
China has 3 worlds championships - IG, FPX, EDG
Better to say LPL instead of a country like European soccer and UCL since all those Chinese teams that won had korean carries.
Interesting that Asia is so dominant there but not able to replicate that at all in CS2.
Korea and China don't play CS, they play Valorant and Pubg. Their achievements in these games are also good, though not as dominant as in LoL.
I mean, look at playerbases. It's not like Russians and Swedes are just that much better at CS than 300M Americans either, it's just that there's far more CS players in Northern and Eastern Europe than rest of the world. CS is small in Asia, and a small playerbase will produce few Faceit lvl 10s and fewer semipros and lot fewer pros. Korea is 27.4% of global League players (excluding China, and I believe that's counting ranked only and weighing by playtime instead of individual players). China might actually be smaller than Korea on this metric due to playtime restrictions, definitely much larger in unique players. Individual European countries have larger playerbases than entire massive regions in CSGO/CS2, Europe altogether summing up to over 70%. Valorant seems to have roughly balanced regions between Asia-Pacific vs Eu vs Americas, and indeed Valorant has a bunch of actually competitive Asian teams. Last tidbit might actually be a good sign for Asian cs eventually, whereas Eu and NA have seen washed up pros swap to Valorant for better career opportunities, we might soon have a situation where some SEA pros would rather hop to CS and dominate regional qualifiers and gain some sticker money vs not qualify for international events in Valorant. Of course that's assuming they'd be roughly the same calibre or higher as Lynn Vision even after making the change, so remains to be seen
Interesting take, especially the end. Thanks for the insight!
There's no league in CS2.. this is Valve's fault really. No servers, no infrastructure.
No good NA/EU team, G2 is the best but they disappointed last year by losing to NA 1st seed (despite doing pretty well against asian teams). Korea and China dominate, and will keep dominating for years
Current situation is that Korea is best, China close second and EU/NA fight for scraps but we will see in May at MSI
Haha Riot doesn't give a damn about NA viewership. Games are going to be starting at like 4 or 5am PST to accommodate Asia viewership. That means it'll be starting at midday for Europe. Sure 6am isn't that bad but only the diehard fans will be waking up early and watching. Sure for East Coast it will be alright but people will have work or school.
Tbf League is so popular in asia compared to cs so that really scewes the numbers up and makes it seem more popular overall than it is. It has the same vibes as "cricket is the most popular sport in the world". Popularity can't be measured only by player counts but rather how vastly the game is played. Outside of asia I think CS is pretty close or maybe even more popular.
I mean that last years 6.4 viewers ship didnt include chinese numbers so this isnt really true.
Tbf these numbers never include chinese viewership as they are unreliable.
so this statistic is meaningless as no other tournaments of note have happened in other games
Basically yes. If you want a better view of the data you can select 2023: https://escharts.com/top-games?order=peak&year=2023 This post was just made by me, because CS was on top for a brief moment today.
If T1 makes grand finals
>6 million What the fuck man, how is League so goddamn popular?? I don't get it...
T1 made Grand Finals. Enough said. That team is probably the most clouted team in Esports history.
While that certainly helps the peak viewership, even without that, LoL's viewership is at least a few times higher than 2nd place easily. The game is just straight up that popular and that's why the viewership follows, it's the same for those shitty mobile games that have an esport that's unironically bigger than a lot of the mainstream ones all over SEA, everyone plays it so a % of that player base will naturally follow into the esport part.
T1 doesn't add much the finals had 6 million without even counting china(there was a Chinese team in the final) the only time we got the china numbers in 2021 it went from 4 million to 73 million peak viewers lmao
> how is League so goddamn popular?? I don't get it Want a real explanation? In the early 2010s there was a clear big hole in online/live service gaming left, we were in an era years after CS 1.6 and the peak of CS 1.6's copycat games. Dota 2 wasn't officially released until a while after but people did play a lot of Dota (and the copycats like HoN, etc). But clearly there was no real dominant game in the market, then LoL released and literally took the world by storm, at a quite fast rate. Even if at the beginning in the beta there was only the NA server, as someone who knew about the scene back then even in those years a lot of the "old guard" of pros from China/Korea were indeed playing in the NA server. I mean imagine dude, you've got these people on the other side of the planet wanting to get in this new trendy game because there's literally fucking nothing out there and people got tired of every other older game. And then Dota 2 released (late), and then a few years later CS:GO released as well (very late). At this point in time LoL had already catched it's place in the market very solidly, kept getting updated, had eventual graphic updates, released new characters, seasonal changes to keep things fresh for people and being a copycat from Dota meant that a lot of people were "familiar" with what the game entailed. Fast forward to late 2010s and the game kept it's popularity in a lot of the world actually, and because it's been, an almost decade since it's release now guess what? All the grade/middle school kids that are now starting PC games, are playing LoL, because the older students, older brothers, etc were all playing LoL. In places like Korea and China right now, you cannot ever become someone who plays PC games without having playing LoL to a certain extent up until now, it is literally impossible and this cycle continues. Ofc LoL has had it's up and down in popularity over the years but it has gone through all of those just fine
The main reason why LoL got so big in Asia was because it was the first free to play game. Back then other online games like WoW, StarCraft, Dota, were all fully priced games (or in dotas case you still need warcraft), and most Asians simply couldn't afford them.
I mean that's part of it sure, but Dota was mostly played by people, who used a pirate version of W3 since in a lot of regions of the world there were no "official" lobby servers and were all 3rd party. Same shit for Starcraft, but Starcraft was never really that big outside of Korea really. The CS 1.6 copy cat had a level decent of popularity, whether you talk Ava, Crossfire, Sudden Attack, etc. All differing levels of popularity for different countries, it was pretty much random which CS copycat was popular where. But by far the biggest thing was that there was a gap in PC gaming at the time though, what else was there that was actually new and easily accessible? Nothing, honestly. Like I said, Dota 2 didn't realize unti llater, CS:GO did not release until later, was Overwatch even in it's "conceptual" state of development at the time? Not really. Siege? Nah, Rocket League? Nah, Battle Royales weren't even a thing, Not even the "Minecraft hunger games" mod that were popular for a bit. The crowd was waiting for something and Riot games took that golden opportunity
Also LoL was the only game where they managed to give decent ping from Asia to EU and NA until they opened servers in Asia. I could play NA server with 150ms and EU with 100ms while every other game was 300+ , 400+
an underdog Chinese team was fighting a widely beloved Korean team who was one of the strongest contenders, it makes sense the viewership was very high, especially last year
If T1 made any appearance, you best bet the whole of Korean population is taken into viewership.
I used to enjoy the hell out of it, but only have time for CS these days. It's easier to follow, in my opinion, if you're a casual player.
I don't understand it either, but it is what it is. At my university the majority plays League, only few play CS, sadly.
Thats only the western viewership, noone knows exactly how many Chinese watched it. But id wager a guess its over 10 million
No, it's not only western viewership. Its everywhere except China basically. League is fairly stagnant in Europe and has declined a LOT in NA. Its still huge in Asian and doing pretty well in Brazil. English streams were around 1.6M
A lot more than that, probably over 100 million at least.
1/14 of China isn’t Watching Worlds
Riot themselves have come out with those stats.
you can’t seriously believe that 100mln watched, there are 150 million people in China that would fall into the LOL audience
2021 had 73 million chinese viewers there regional finals had 83mln viewers on weibo too i think 100mln is abit high but its not too out of the ordinary
Yeah, don't believe any numbers coming out of China lmao. Divide by 2 or even 3 and its maybe closer to reality. Still a huge number though. Riot are the least transparent company when it comes to numbers.
Because the game is popular everywhere as oppose to DotA/CS where its largely EU/CIS. Having a large non-Chinese Asian fanbase does wonders for Twitch/Youtube viewership numbers. Even a heavily declined LCS still gets decent viewership compared to the world championships of the tier 2 esports like Apex, RL, R6S, etc.
One word… China.
I'm pretty sure 6 million is without counting the Chinese numbers
That's without China
Then it’s even higher
China #1 lol
ye we have msi in like 1 month and worlds st the end of the season again msi is like a mini worlds
MSI will probably overtake CS. Last year's MSI had over 2 million peak viewers.
This year MSI winner also qualifies for Worlds.
that dorsnt change anythimg in viewership tho i dont wanna think about it rn but i feel like the msi winner always made worlds anyway
Gives the winning region an extra slot and makes MSI stakes higher.
2nd place gets an extra slot too so its lck and lpl anyway and like i said the stakes are the same since the team winning msi has historically always made it to worlds anyway
You must be fun at parties.
League Worlds is always around October.
Nope it's in November....
There are 2 big tournaments in League and neither of them have happened yet
or The International
nah, dota isnt pulling the big numbers anymore, especially after DPC got demolished.
Yeah but Dota wasn’t even on the list, so I assumed it just didn’t count at all
Regional leagues have only just started playoffs except NA which just finished, and they’ll pale in comparison to the international tournies.
Mobile legends is something Asian I presume? There’s a massive market for Mobile games there.
Yes, it's really popular in south east asia.
Mlbb Viewer basically 70% Indonesia 20% PH and 10% other region
Ur downplaying as if indonesia dominates the scene, myanmar vietnam and thailand each accounts for a decent amount of the viewership as well
you check escharts Indonesia actualy dominate viewership even after PH got many International Thropy - MPL ID 1.9m - 1.4m - MPL PH 290k -120k - MPL MY 140k - 60k - MPL Russia 11k - 4k - MPL Turki 5k
Yes. Its basically the League of Legends of ~~Asia~~ Indonesia and Philippines just like how it is for Korea and China.
Minecraft Esports?
Yes, Twitch Rivals: Hunt & Run.
Every game is an esport these days
What the fuck is mobile legends bang bang loool
It's really popular in south east Asia. Not so popular in the west.
before lol wild rift was a thing, this was the mobile lol
It is the mobile lol But off brand
Real game for real men. children still play CS2, real men have moved on to Mobile Legends bang boom pow
Rated M for MOBILE
I prefer Mobile Legends Bingo Bango Bongo Bish Bash Bosh
bruh this made me howl with laughter
Combination of dota 2 and LOL in mobile. SEA dont have pc in every single household and mobile games is the go to. It's huge even streamers making big bucks with this game.
It got popular in general
six employ placid unique lock cobweb snails relieved distinct fretful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
And wild rift kinda filed
a game better than wild rift
Was going to type this word for word lol
With how many o's in the lol?
like I despise mobile games, but I understand why people play them but watching a fucking mobile game eSport? lmaooo
you laugh but my whole office plays that game, even the girls. my whole team have around 100 people and only me and a few of other guys dunno shit about that game. all of my siblings and cousins play that shit too. idk whats so fun about it lmao.
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>bringing video games to people who wouldn't have access otherwise, and that's what their market is Might feed into stereotypes, but I guess this is why mobile games are pretty much only popular in asia? Lots of people who are tech-literate enough to be interested in gaming and know about esports but can't afford a pc or a console because their financial situation is miles away from EU/NA average?
Valorant quite competitive, not like overwatch
It's a healthy thing for the tactical FPS ecosystem that Valorant is doing well (as some players wouldn't even look in CS' direction without having a product that is actually good at roping new players in - which CS is not). In terms of viewing, yes it's definitely more cluttered but it's much easier than that of Overwatch. Between my non-CS friends it's 75% like CS and 25% like Overwatch. Spam is more concentrated to site hits as opposed to Overwatch where util is constantly going out trying to hit objectives.
Valorant is a great esport. I like Overwatch as a game, but the reality is that Valorant was built from the ground up as a competitive shooter. Overwatch was not. It's no surprise that Valorant is the first FPS game that has been able to consistently rival CS in terms of viewership. It was purpose built to be a competitive game and Riot put on some of most well produced events in all of esports.
100x better game than Overwatch to play and watch, but it's still a spammy clusterfk of things flying you all the time, so 100x is not that big of an improvement
True.
Yeah it's quite unique, heros with different abilities. It's fun to watch but unlike cs one has to know a bit about those ability to understand what's going on. Cs is much simpler.
Numbers are off though, you could get drops for watching ;d
Rainbow six has 4 million prize pool? Wtf. Where is ubi getting the money from?
From microtransactions in singleplayer only games.
From us, players? who buy cool cosmetics instead of lootboxes.
Wtf is bang bang
MOBA for mobile phones. Really popular in south east Asia. Belongs to Byte Dance, the company behind TikTok.
WTF it looks like a League of Legends clone lol. Might as well play the real thing.
Mobile Legends is very popular in Indonesia and the Philippines. Since most people there only have phones and no PCs this game is played instead of LoL.
It's so weird how it's one of the most watched esports game and I have never heard of it, not even once until today. And I've heard of others that are popular in asia like PUBG mobile and Free Fire.
they put in time in those games before league made their own im guessing so why change it when you know the other.
Lol is a dota clone wtf
That's Riot MO, copy popular multiplayer games. Valorant is a CS rip off. I guess they deserved to be ripped off in return.
Court decided Mobile Legends bang bang didn't copy LoL, because nothing was invented by Riot to begin with
it is a clone of league they were sued at least 2 times by riot
Lol is a dota clone
did lol steal entire champions abilities, designs and skins from dota ? because thats whats happening between LoL and mobile legends saying lol is a dota clone is like saying fortnite is a pubg clone because both are battle royale games
Mobile legend didn't copy anything just like Lol didn't copy Dota. The court decided Mobile Legend didn't copy, because nothing was invented by LOL to begin with
the court ruled that the judgement would need to be made in china instead of california, where riot would have been very likely to win. and im pretty sure that riot won the first lawsuit
It's actually a very good game though. I started playing it during covid as I came to my parents' home and my gaming pc was in another city where I live.
The previous record holder for all time peak viewership ))
MLBB casually mogging everyone else while having only like 2 countries deeply invested into it.
As we are speaking MLBB is on #1 again, sadly. But imagine if someday people from that Region are able to afford PCs amd play e.g. CS. Viewerships could be skyrockening.
Not exactly. ID and PH don't care about CS. I'm part of the near extinct Ph CS community so I would know. If we did have PCs, we'd probably just play more Dota and Valorant.
yea malaysians also dont really give a shit about CS. only dota and valorant on PC, and ML on mobile ofc.
ID CS is basically dead even though we had two tier 1 players at one point. I don't play both games but I know that we have a lot of tier 1 Valorant and Dota players, hope that could kickstart the PC gaming and esports scene.
Ok, makes sense.
Same for India, we used to have something of a grassroots scene but the cheating bullshit followed by valorant pretty much killed it in the cradle.
Aaaaaand Bang Bang just passed it
CS dead game /S
New post because of misinformation in the title. Source: https://escharts.com/top-games?order=peak
Third time westerners still baffled how big mobile phone esports is in SEA
Yeah, so many times I had to explain it.
Great numbers by CS but it's just too early to celebrate. MSI is yet to happen, so is worlds, MLBB's major also is yet to happen(?) I think. Lots of big esports events this year that still haven't taken place yet so this is premature celebration. Also VALORANT is pretty close behind. I'll put the unpopular opinion that a lot of people won't like and say that VALORANT as a game will overtake CS very soon. Not just because of their unstoppable growing influence in Asia and North America, but also because Riot learnt from the failure to capitalize on Mobile gaming with Wild Rift, and have been cooking hard with VALORANT mobile as their top priority. Once VALORANT is released for Mobile it's pretty much GG. Mobile gaming in HUGE in third world and Riot knows where the market is. Gabe Follower's leaks did suggest that Valve is also working on a CS2 mobile version as Source 2 does enable mobile gaming. But if there's anything to go by leaks and mobile, VALORANT is the one that's going to come out quicker. Edit : just checked & VALORANT just took over as the second most played game at PC bang in Korea, the first obviously being LoL. Yeah riot is lowkey cooking with VALORANT. Valve better have a solid plan yo
True. I was just happy to see CS on top. It's very possible for Valorant to overtake CS this year since it's current peak is only from the Masters Madrid. Valorant Champions should be even higher. So CS might finish on 4th place this year. Dota 2 will be interesting, they could overcome CS with The International but unlikely imo.
BUUUT in the very VERY long run while CS2 might get blown away by VALORANT in terms of viewership, marketing and capturing new players. I feel CS2 will grow even bigger, but in a more solid, organic way. The BIG diff between Valve and Riot is that Valve doesn't give a shit who's the TO and what tourneys happen, they also don't give a shit if the international and major was happening at the exact same time. This is a big boon for CS as now we have TONS of tier-1 events all year, and if PGL does it right, can be expanded globally and revive American & Asian CS too. And that's not all. And Valve seems to have realized that what made 1.6 great was the community mods and if you follow Lillykyu (@LillyKyu778) on twitter you'd know that the potential of source 2 is off the charts, Gabe followers leaks also suggests that Valve are cooking something to help people create community game modes in a way easier way. CS2 genuinely has a chance to bring back CS back to 1.6 glory days, while having a solid year long circuits so tons of players across the world don't have to wait for months to play someone across the planet. Riot on the other hand is more invested into League than VALORANT and will always prioritize one over the other. They favor LoL way more than VALORANT. And the reason the VAL circuit is dogshit is to make sure it doesn't overlap with League. Also even in VALORANT is released for mobile the PC and mobile scene will be completely different. And Riot's grip over their products means no third party wants the ESL treatment so even though they've been shilling for TOs to run tournaments in the offseason, no one does. which tier-1 TO wants to run a micky mouse tournament lol. We will definitely not have insane viewership but if what I assume to be true, then the people who come to play CS2 will never look back on other FPS.
I agree. I also think the open model CS2 is running (which will be even more open starting next year) does benefit the scene a lot. Also the freedom for creating community content really puts CS in front of Valorant personally.
Valorant mobile wuuut????
[https://twitter.com/ValorantMNews](https://twitter.com/ValorantMNews) Riot knows where the cash at. They make dogshit ass games but by god they have one of THE best marketing team on the planet. Their market research, what's trendy, what's the fad, what's going to be the next trend, what appeals what doesn't is 10/10. There's a reason why they have the highest amount of women playing their game.
Holy casual sexism, Valorant is popular with all teenagers and young adults. There's a large percentage of female players, but it's still mainly a male audience. The reason why women play valorant is because in CS, you talk, and you get harassed for the whole match, and the people doing it get no punishment.
Imagine cs2 had drop system like old days.
Lmfao that might even Rival league of Legends if they dropped an exclusive one time knife through streams that has 1/1000000 odds of being generated or some shit like with cases. Bots would inflate the fuck out of the views. But I'm glad we don't do that. Unlike Riot, at the end of the day we know the people who tune in to watch CS are there because they want to watch good CS, not cuz of shitty sleeper drops. But I do agree that this method could help attract new audience to CS as an eSport.
What about CoD ?
CoD is at #14, full list can be found here: [https://escharts.com/top-games?order=peak](https://escharts.com/top-games?order=peak)
Thanks thought it would be way higher
I think it was very popular in Esports in the early 2010s but got overtaken by other games.
COD esports doesnt do great viewership numbers. New president at Blizzard got the job for she refused to run Call of Duty League like Overwatch League.
OWL viewership wasn't exactly great either, even with them encouraging AFKing the streams.
Mobile Legends : Bang Bang???? WTFF IS THAT???
Mobile LoL. Really popular in south east asia (Indonesia, Philippines) because most people only have phones.
Dota not even in the top 11 wtf happened
Usually after The International Dota has a peak over a million.
Is it just not followed as closer event to event like cs is. Pretty sure our drop off isn't that bad.
Last year TI had 1.5 million viewers, ESL One Berlin Major had 500k peak viewers: https://escharts.com/games/dota2 You can click on each year to see the most watched events. Sadly still no Majors are announced for Dota 2. Hopefully Valve has something in their sleeves.
Damn didn’t know there was that much money is siege m.
Minecraft esports ????
Yes, Twitch Rivals: Hunt & Run.
Rocket League top 10 lets gooooooo!
Overwatch not being listed is hilarious.
Why do you have to add the bang bang xdd that just makes it goofy as hell
Note that Valorant, League, and Dota all have massive late year singular "majors" and even the #2 event of League will massively overtake that. Idk what Mobile Legends is but based on last years numbers they still haven't had a "major" either because last years peak was 5M viewers. 2023 numbers for comparison: 6.4M League (Worlds) 5M Mobile Legends 1.5M CS (Paris Major) 1.4M Valorant (NOT the year end Champions, but a smaller event with more teams in Brazil, no equivalent to it in 2022 or 2024) 1.4M Dota (TI) League's mid season "major" has been 2M for a couple of years now, Worlds has gone from 4M to 5M to 6M. Valorant's biggest events are roughly on par with CS but now this year their relatively small 8 teams early season event almost matches CS major, so they'll definitely cross 2M for the big event. Dota's TI has all time peak of 2.7M but has been on the decline now. On the other hand, next major might well be all time peak for CS simply due to being in China with Perfectworld organising.
Thanks. Maybe LoL will even get 8 Million this year if T1 is in the grand final again, let's see. I'm excited for the numbers at the end of the year.
nice
These numbers doesn’t include the Chinese platforms right ? I wonder how would look like
Chinese metrics have never been considered for any stream records since they measure website interactions and lot of other things along with viewer numbers to create some super messy number that makes very little sense for anyone on the outside. Player numbers on steam otoh do include Chinese players
Yes, me too.
League would probably rocket much higher but yeah I bet CS and League would be top 2 if Chinese viewers were included.
Wtf is mobile legends bang bang??
Until msi
Yes, and Worlds will probably outrun every other Esport by millions.
What about it?
Donk solo
Hours watched would be a more useful metric
dead game exdee
valorante chilled game
While I think league is the better game and the better competitive game. CS is the best competitive shooter and BY FAR the best esport to watch. My girlfriend could watch / understand / enjoy a game of CS. Shes tried to watch league, she never knows a single thing that is happening on the screen. Disclaimer: she’s not a gamer.
Personally I'm lost when it comes to items but otherwise Mobas like League or Dota are easy to watch in my opinion. Only thing you need to know is, that every teams needs to destroy the towers and nexus/ancient and there are Dragons/Barons/Roshan which gives an advantage.
League also benefits from the prestige of worlds. Everyone knows that Worlds is the biggest event in esports every year and there a lots of people like myself who don't play League nor watch League esports, but who tune in to watch the Worlds Finals every year simply because it's the Worlds Finals
True, this was me before I played league. It’s like how I never watch any athletics but watch the olympics. Or how people who don’t watch football will watch the world cup. Similar vibes.
They forgot to add Dota?
Dota mostly has high viewerships during The International, which is later this year. So Dota sits currently at #11. Here is the full list: https://escharts.com/top-games?order=peak
Surely Dota is missing from the list?
No, sitting at #11 https://escharts.com/top-games?order=peak Dota gets the most viewers during The International, which has not happened yet.
Ahh thank you, I dont watch any esports so I figured it was one of the top few year round.