

The rankings emphasise the most watched games in this rapidly growing sport and poses answers to the interest by potential investors, brands, and sponsors of eSports. As the largest online game streaming platform, Twitch is well aware that their service, exposing the sport to millions of spectators, is responsible for positively impacting on game sales and player retention. You can bet on e-sport with Bet365.

Adding credibility, Newzoo, a market intelligence company, launches monthly rankings for the sport. Their Twitch Tracker is one part of many in its intelligence registry focussing on eSports. So, between Newzoo and Twitch, they are the power behind the Global eSports Market Premium Service, complementing the eSports Consumer Insights service, that covers 26 countries.

Leagues of Legends, CS:GO, and Dota 2 are consistent in featuring in the most watched eSports, measured in hours streamed. However, the best performance by far comes from League of Legends in their World Championship, which was watched by millions of spectators, and equalled 60 million hours of viewership. In an 11-month period, almost 264 million hours of viewership was clocked up by League of Legends content on Twitch. Definitely, the highest out of all the games streamed.

Dota 2 was the top title for June 2016, following a really huge May, which consumed 10 million hours focused only on the Epicentre tournament.

June was also the month that League of Legends knocked CS:GO off its top spot. With May being a month that had a desperate lack of any major CS:GO tournaments, this resulted in not much live-streaming for the brand.

At number 7, Street Fighter V’s prowess just proves that Capcom were so right to make this version a true eSport title.

Overwatch, from Blizzard, nearly made the top 10, coming in at the number 11 spot. Newzoo reports that in its PC Game Ranking, Overwatch is the 4th most played computer title in Europe and the US, so maybe it’s due for a major growth in popularity and viewership. It could do with some help since losing viewers after some of its events, but the playing base is still streets ahead of the viewers, eSports claims only 1% of the total of hours watched.

League of Legends remained in the top spot in June, and Dota 2 gained a position at 2nd. Hardly surprising since it accounted for 58% of total hours watched, with the strong eSports content for that month.

Showing a vast drop of almost 15 million hours, Hearthstone did not perform strongly at all.

Dead by Daylight, Starbreeze’s June release, popped up at number 6, great news for the increasingly popular horror genre. However, its rise came at the cost to another horror game, H1Z1.

NBA 2K16 debuted at number 14. This shows a growth spurt in the last 6 months.

Following the Dreamhack Summer tournaments and the Summer Champs America, Heroes of the Storm made a re-entry at number 17, after being absent from the top 20 for a month.

Maybe due to supporters of the physical game watching Copa America or the European cup, FIFA 16 dropped a huge 7 spots to number 18.

With Twitch and other online streaming media platforms being so easily available, so it has added to the promotion and growth of eSports competitions. Most of the top games have a measure of success with live streaming, and it all adds a positive to the sport.

Demographics show that approximately 85% of Twitch viewers are male, mostly aged between 18 and 34.

The CS:GO ESL One New York debuted the first virtual reality live stream, with Wonderworld VR capturing the Barclays Centre experience, and Sliver.tv giving viewers a 360-degree perspective using its LiveVRCast technology. The incredible number of social media engagements made history, with ESL’s Facebook and Twitter channels generating in excess of 122 million impressions, including 7 million fan engagements.

The Call of Duty World League Championships was streamed around the globe by Twitch, YouTube, and MLG.TV. It was also viewed in-game on the Live Event Viewer. Fans of Call of Duty have viewed more than 1.1 billion minutes of content in tune-ins equalling 100 million. But of course, not all of us enjoy e-sport and actually more people still bet on classic sports. If you are one of those people, here is a Bingo promo code for you to enjoy!