EPT
Huh? What's this?
For those of you who don't already know what this is about: I'm gathering various data from all the streams that are presented on teamliquid.net (viewers, game, events, etc.) and use that data to produce the pretty tables you see below. The tables only contain SC2 players (that is, people streaming games of Starcraft 2 being played by themselves) and not casters, teams or other streams. The tables also only contain Starcraft 2 related activities, a SC2 streamer streaming Dota2 or other games is not being taken into account.
For current stream data, go and visit soiii's site http://sc2streamnumbers.com/ where you can check out detailed graphs of stream viewers of every stream. (Thread here). Please check it out, it's pretty awesome. I thought about doing something like that at some point, but soiii did it way better and prettier than I could've ever done.
The list
Due to space limitations, the headers aren't as clear as I'd like them to be, so here's a quick explanation, just in case: "Viewers" denotes the average viewers in the given month. "Hours" are the hours played. "Place diff" and "V. diff" are the place and viewer differences compared to last month. And "HotS%" is the percentage of Heart of the Swarm streaming compared to Wings of Liberty. A full green bar means the player streamed only HotS, a grey bar means he only streamed WoL.
Now, Without further ado, here's this month's tables:
(The HTML versions contain some more information due to space reasons, such as the featured status of the various streams.)
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/top50October_.png)
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/top50OctoberX_.png)
Is there a (negative) trend?
I've compiled a bar chart for the total SC2 stream viewers by month. The actual numbers are not important, so ignore the y axis numbers. It's the ratio between month that's important. The results are pretty interesting. See for yourself:
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/Total%20viewers%20by%20month.png)
I first compiled the bar chart without differentiating between WoL and HotS, and I started to write various possible reasons as to why the drop in viewer numbers could have occurred this month (start of school, lack of revenue from streams, etc.). Looking at the same graph with WoL and HotS viewers split up, however, it becomes quite obvious what the problem is. Viewership of WoL streams actually went up from the previous month, if only slightly. And between August and September, the total viewership didn't change, either. What did happen, however, was that the pros stopped streaming HotS and got back to playing WoL, and it appears that most of us that watched HotS did not go back to watch WoL.
It could be the other way around, too. It's not possible from this graph alone to find out whether the viewers stopped watching HotS streams (therefore making the streamers play WoL again), or if the streamers stopped streaming HotS and the viewers lost interest. Either way, I did not expect HotS to have such a big influence in viewer numbers. Interesting.
Pros: Go and stream more HotS shenanigans!
Some stray observations
- First of all, my apologies to Neytpoh. From the data I have, it's not immediately obvious whether a stream is showing a player playing (making him eligible for this list), a caster (like Day9) or an event (like MLG) or something else. So I have to manually categorize every stream. And for some reason I categorized Neytpoh as caster, excluding him from the list. Someone pointed this out to me in the last thread, and after some investigation I just couldn't figure out why I categorized him as a caster back then and not as a player. It's possible that he used his stream to cast some games, but I couldn't verify that. And from what I can see, he's been streaming nothing but games lately, so I put him back in as player. As you can see, Neytpoh does some pretty good numbers, which are especially impressive given that he's not a featured player. Were it not for my stupidity, he'd be in the lists for the last few months, too. So, again, my apologies, Neytpoh.
- And while we're at it, if you know of a streamer who totally should be in this list but isn't, or if you see any kind of mistake (people being in the wrong team, etc.), please do feel free to let me know either in this thread or by PM.
- As you can see, the initial excitement of the streamers over Heart of the Swarm has died down considerably. Now it could easily be said that this means
the end of the worldthat nobody cares about HotS, but I don't think it's that simple. The majority of the people on the top 50 streamers list are, obviously, pro gamers. It's their job to be good at the game that's played in the tournaments. And that's Wings of Liberty, and not Heart of the Swarm. So I think the lack of HotS streams is perfectly normal. I'm very interested to see the HotS numbers change when the expansion nears its release date, however. - Some notable absentees this month: Thorzain, Sen, Scarlett, Nerchio, SaSe, sLivko, BabyKnight, Drewbie, Zenio, MajOr, TheStC.
- On the other hand we have more pros from Korean teams again this month. Tails, Losira, Happy, Gumiho and Leenock. Yay!
- We also have some lesser known names (that is, people I didn't know before) in the lists this time.
- KnowMe is a German Protoss player who's contributing to Szenecast (Similar to State of the Game) and writes a blog series titled "KnowMe wird Progamer" at sc2pro.taketv.net.
- gaulzi is an Icelandic Protoss player who is known for one thing and one thing only: Cannon rushing every single game. He literally cannon rushes absolutely every single game, just for the fun of it. And he's beaten pros with it. How awesome is that?
- Tara Babcock is, er, well.. Google her. Don't do it while you're at work, though.
- KnowMe is a German Protoss player who's contributing to Szenecast (Similar to State of the Game) and writes a blog series titled "KnowMe wird Progamer" at sc2pro.taketv.net.
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