Top 50 streamers in August 2013 (plus WCS numbers) - Page 4

On September 02 2013 06:02 AiuRMC wrote:
I don't understand, I saw more than 90k in the grand final , how can u say 70k???

On September 02 2013 05:31 HornyHerring wrote:
Wow, hots viewership goes down even faster than wol. Wonder if its the game or just the amount of content.

On September 02 2013 06:59 SupLilSon wrote:

That's not what the OP said at all.... And if anything, WCS viewership seems really lackluster. I've seen Dendi and Dread bring in more viewers than a concurrent WCS stream.

The player stream viewership is about as high as it was during the drought at the end of last year where the HotS has been closed, but HotS itself has not yet been released, and everyone lost interest in WoL. And this time, there's no such obvious excuse for these numbers. Have people simply lost interest in watching players stream? Or is SC2 really dying?

Well, no. It's not. Player streams are clearly suffering lately, that much is undoubtedly true. But we cannot extrapolate that onto the whole of SC2.

I never included a similar graph to the one above including all SC2 stream numbers, simply because back when I started gathering data, all the big tournaments (MLG, IPL, GSL, etc.) did not provide live viewer numbers and, if at all, only published them later on (usually in a widely exaggerated manner, giving out unique instead of concurrent viewers and so on. Hello, MLG!). But that has changed. MLG and IPL are gone, and GSL streams on twitch now. Dreamhack has always offered live viewership numbers, because they're cool that way, so practically every premier tournament these days offers these numbers.

So I now can provide these numbers. Awesome. So I created the same graph as above, just with all SC2 related streams. But, again, note that all pre-HotS numbers are incomplete and are missing most big tournaments. So do not compare these with anything. I only leave them in to give you a rough idea, but what's important here are the months since HotS came out.

So no, we cannot say that HotS numbers are better than WoL numbers overall, even if it looks like that. It's likely that it is true nonetheless, but without all the data, there's no way of saying for sure.

But what we can say, however, is that SC2 is not dying. The numbers are not going up, clearly, but they are largely stable. Interest in player streams seems to be getting lower, but WCS and other tournaments seem to easily take up the slack to keep the people watching their favorite game.