Market research firm Newzoo published data this week that suggests Riot Games and the Electronic Sports League are the top professional eSports tournament broadcasters on Twitch — at least in terms of hours watched.
Twitch is the highest-profile platform for video game streaming, so the fact that Riot is the dominant tourney broadcaster on the service is notable — especially when you consider that the studio has only one game: League of Legends.
After a ten-month survey of Twitch viewership habits via the Twitch API, Newzoo reports that Riot accounted for roughly 28 percent (see chart below) of all the hours people spent watching “professionally organized eSports tournaments” — which does not include individual streams of eSports, even by pro players.
The ESL follows close behind, claiming 23 percent (or roughly 129.4 million hours) of the same pie. Unlike Riot, the ESL has many games under its purview, including Valve’s Counter-Strike: GO and Dota 2.
Valve, incidentally, came in fourth on Newzoo’s ranking of eSports tourney broadcasters with 9 percent of the total hours spent watching said broadcasters.
In a broader sense, developers may appreciate Newzoo’s report that during its ten-month Twitch viewership study (which ran from last August through May), 14 to 31 percent of the hours people spent watching Twitch every month were spent watching pro eSports tournaments.
As you might expect, profesional event organizers accounted for the lion’s share of that attention: 71.3 percent of the hours people spent watching pro eSports tourneys on Twitch were spent watching streams from event organizers, rather than rebroadcasters.
Further findings from Newzoo’s research, as well as more details on how that research was conducted, can be found over on the company’s blog.
