The Latest Counter-Strike Major Surpasses League of Legends in Twitch Viewership
The most recent major tournament in Counter-Strike was more popular on Twitch than the finals of Riot’s League Championship Series (LCS) and any other event in the past year, according to a chart released by Gamoloco, a website that tracks data from live streaming platforms.
Impressive Numbers for ESL Cologne
The tournament, ESL Cologne, which is one of Counter-Strike’s annual major tournaments, concluded with a Fnatic victory. During peak times, the event garnered over 1.2 million concurrent viewers, and fans consumed nearly nine million hours of broadcast content from the event on Saturday alone. In comparison, the LCS finals only reached a peak of just over six million hours viewed.
Counter-Strike Dominates the League of Legends Calendar
Even the group stage broadcasts from Cologne on weekdays received more viewership than one of the biggest days on the League of Legends calendar. However, it is important to note that the ESL event packs more matches into each day and has continuous rebroadcasts, allowing viewers to watch more hours of content compared to the LCS finals, which only consists of one series between two teams.
Factors to Consider
It is worth mentioning that the numbers on the chart are specific to Twitch and do not account for streaming services popular in countries like China, where League of Legends is wildly popular. Despite these caveats, the viewership numbers for Counter-Strike are still impressive and indicate its continued growth, especially in the Western audience. The upcoming DreamHack Winter tournament in 2015 will be interesting to watch to see if it can surpass these figures.