Recent esports Tournaments Show Promising Attendance Numbers
Over the past weekend we saw two titans of esports, League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, hold major tournaments. On Sunday the European and North American League of Legends Championship Series summer finals concluded with the Counter-Logic Gaming team taking first place for North America, $50,000 in prize money, and a ticket directly into the 2015 World Championship, and Fnatic taking home the trophy for Europe. Fans of CS:GO were entertained from Thursday to Sunday with the ESL One: Cologne tournament, a tournament partially sponsored by CS:GO developer Valve, with $100,000 going to the winning team and $250,000 overall up for grabs. The weekend was filled with teams from all over the world aiming to take the top prize.
Both esports events captured a huge number of fans, and CS:GO set a sixth month high for Twitch.tv view hours in a single day. Via Gamoloco, CS:GO averaged more than seven million hours per day across the for the four day event, peaking at 8.9 million view hours on Saturday. It should be noted the number of hours is likely skewed by users logging in with multiple CS:GO accounts in order to raise their chances to receive a free in-game item drop, so these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. The infographic below displays the game itself rather than the specific ESL One Twitch channel, which is to say there were other streams being watched for CS:GO and League of Legends beyond just the official ESL One and LCS streams.
By specific channels with each game, Gamoloco rates ESL One compiling 24.4 million hours (with another one million hours on the official “B Stream”) compared to Riot Games, developer of LoL, totaling just over five million hours over the past week. These numbers represent the English speaking channels only, with the Russian channel covering ESL One accumulating nearly three million hours, plus Polish and German broadcasts for each game.
The crowds at both live venues were impressive as well, with the League of Legends NA Summer tournament filling up Madison Square Garden with a reported 11,000 fans. Europe was no slouch either as ESL looking as though the Lanxess Arena drew a fair crowd as the header image would indicate, along with a large crowd at the EU LCS at Stockholm’s Hovet Arena. While it’s hard to compare a single tournament to the long grind of a sports season, the NA Summer event pulled a crowd comparable to the NHL’s Florida Panthers and more than the MLS’ Chivas USA, though both the Panthers and Chiva rank last in attendance for their respective leagues.
These impressive numbers aren’t even counting Dota 2’s yearly tournament, The International that was held from July 27 to August 8 to decide the world’s champion where we saw the single largest prize pool for an esports tournament. With the growing prize pool, interest level and time commitments being dedicated to esports — not to mention push notifications the ESPN app and score tickers (cap tip to HeyCJay from Reddit) and streams on ESPN 3 — it may be time to pick your favorite esports organization just the same as a football or baseball team.
(Header image via ESL Twitter)
You can catch David spouting off about baseball, soccer, esports and other things by following him on twitter, @davidwiers.
I wish the NA finals had been nearly as entertaining as the EU finals were. The EU finals was one of the best LoL series I’ve ever watched, while the NA finals was really just TSM getting outplayed at every part of the game.
It was also awesome that both series featured big rivalries with CLG and TSM being 2 of the oldest teams in NA. In EU Origen was formed this season by Fnatic’s former captain xPeke, so that was a big story there.
Sadly, though, none of it will matter when Korean and Chinese teams steamroll through the world championship like always.
I don’t know, CLG finally breaking through, even n a 3-0 was pretty awesome.
And yeah, the Asian scene is is just leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world. Maybe, just maybe we’ll see enough upsets in London to make things interesting. A man can dream, but as a StarCraft background, I see the Korean/Chinese scene on another level with the foreigners trailing by a fair margin.
Yeah CLG finally winning was awesome, and I’m glad they beat TSM to do it, but I just felt like the games themselves weren’t as good as in EU. Since I don’t root for a team anymore after curse disbanding, it was nice seeing a team like CLG winning it all.
Yeah the only thing that really even gives western teams a fighting chance at worlds is that the best teams go bootcamp in Korea beforehand. TSM did take a game from the eventual champs last year so maybe one day we’ll see one of our top teams make a run.