Super Data Research and Newzoo have put out a report stating that viewership across all eSports titles has doubled within the last year, peaking to over 71 million by the end of 2013. Almost half of those viewers, 31.4 million, come from the United States where males account for 70% of frequent viewers and participants. The report find that the majority of U.S. viewers are males between 21 and 34 years old. The average eSports viewer watches 19 times a month, with a session length of 2.2 hours.
Images and graphs can be found in the link above.
I reached out to Twitch, Riot, etc for confirmation on these numbers. Twitch had no concerns on what is shown here.
One thing I never understand about all these viewing stats released be it from here or from twitch themselves is how come we don't see more concurrent viewers on twitch at any time of the day? If 10s of millions of people are watching esports, shouldn't twitch have at least a million concurrent viewers at least once during the day every day?
Like if you look at twitch right now for all channels I don't think it adds up to 1m concurrent viewers. Also, there was the xbox one streaming stats released the other day, which made it sound amazing and that there were tons of people streaming on the xbox one.
If you look at it now, the top xbox one top channel has 94 viewers. I know sometimes an xbox one stream can have thousands of viewers, but that's only a handful of channels. Unless, the ratio b/w concurrent viewers and people who just tune into a stream for a minute and leave is way different than I think.
Like take this article. It says twitch gets 45m unique viewers per month and 900,000 unique broadcasters per month. Does that mean there are like 899,000 1 viewer channels because I don't see anywhere close to 900,000 channels on twitch.
In 2013, Twitch reached 45 million unique viewers and more than 900,000 unique broadcasters per month, up from 20 million viewers and 300,000 broadcasters in 2012. The service has already surpassed those numbers in 2014, with a million unique broadcasters this month. Users are watching 12 billion minutes of video per month, with the average user watching 106 minutes of content per day.
yeah there are a lot of questions to be asked about these numbers. like, the "average esports viewer" watching 19 times a month doesn't mean much if 9 out of 10 people just watched a single league of legends game and the tenth person watched 180 starcraft games. i probably watch one or two hundred SC games in a month...
i mean, i'm not just out to naysay the statistics, but common sense says they're pretty obviously vague and presented in a way that's intentionally flattering to the industry...
The average eSports viewer watches 19 times a month, with a session length of 2.2 hours.
I don't think I've ever come close to 19 sessions of 2.2 hours of esports within a month
watching twitch streams sure
watching esports streams, no where close to that
thats the big thing that bothers me with this. Esports streams do not equal say watching someone ladder or play custom arcade games. Esports streams to me are competitions basically, like IEM,MLG,LCS,WCS.
And even as a avid competitor and watcher of esports... the average viewer is 19 sessions of 2.2 hours a month? I barely match that between WCS and stuff. as there is hardly that much esports events going on.... to even have 19 sessions for me lol.
It is not just subjected to league of legends, dota2, and sc2 and other PC games, but also console games (makes a lot more sense when you add up the console games statistics, 95% high schoolers play games on a console and that is considered participating in esports.
Little rant incoming, please correct me if i miss something:
So thats whats called "research" these days? Great.
The document (again correct me if i am missing something) conaints 7(!) pages with the first beeing a big picture and the last is kinda useless. Also the graphs are horrible from a "scientific" standpoint but thats not that bad in the big picuture.
Were i come to the "sources". First the not so bad one: "Attendance and viewing data are the results of a survey conducted by SuperData, consisting of 1,080 qualified U.S. respondents." So is this representative? What is a "qualified U.S. respondents"? In which period of time was the data collected? What is "watch every day"? Have i look at the screen or is keeping it on enough.
Which comes to the worst thing "Data provided by Twitch.tv." Its like asking Kim Jong Un wether people like his country or not. Or a bit less harsh how many players a MMO has. Data from that source is as positive as possible at best, or, at worst, just a plain lie.
No offense to anybody it would be great if it would be 100% true but i bloddy hate researches like this.
Data provided by Newzoo. Enthusiasts are defined as frequest eSports viewers and eSports participants
It's just a bad report that hides actual data because they want to hype up the industry they're part of.
You can divide the numbers by 5-10 to get closer to the truth and they would still be fairly impressive relative to five years ago. That said, I agree.
On April 03 2014 04:26 BigFan wrote: those are some good and scary numbers lol. $590M in 2015 for WoTs though, surprising.
Unfortunately as things get bigger game quality takes a back-seat to microtransactions .
Game quality has been taking a back-seat since Unreal Tournament has come out. UT is "easier" than Quake, CS is "easier" than UT and CoD tried to create the easiest game possible. Just as Warcraft 3 was an "easier" version of BW which then led to MOBAs which then led to the "easy" LoL. Almost all genres have been continuously made easier over the past decade and nothing about that will change anytime soon.
OT: I highly doubt these numbers are all that accurate, same as the numbers Riot releases, or MLG releases, are semi-bs. Still the fact remains that the eSports Industry is continuing to grow and that should be celebrated!
On April 03 2014 04:26 BigFan wrote: those are some good and scary numbers lol. $590M in 2015 for WoTs though, surprising.
Unfortunately as things get bigger game quality takes a back-seat to microtransactions .
Game quality has been taking a back-seat since Unreal Tournament has come out. UT is "easier" than Quake, CS is "easier" than UT and CoD tried to create the easiest game possible. Just as Warcraft 3 was an "easier" version of BW which then led to MOBAs which then led to the "easy" LoL. Almost all genres have been continuously made easier over the past decade and nothing about that will change anytime soon.
which is because video games have become more popular among crowds of people who enjoy gaming as a casual and noncompetitive hobby and doesn't in any way represent some sort of "decay" as geeky self-obsessed elitists want to have you believe. SC2 is still healthy and playable at a competitive level both for pros and amateurs, so there's no excuse for whining that more and more people are becoming interested in games considered "easier" or somehow "inferior" other than wanting to exalt yourself over something as meaningless as video game "skills"
On April 03 2014 04:26 BigFan wrote: those are some good and scary numbers lol. $590M in 2015 for WoTs though, surprising.
Unfortunately as things get bigger game quality takes a back-seat to microtransactions .
Game quality has been taking a back-seat since Unreal Tournament has come out. UT is "easier" than Quake, CS is "easier" than UT and CoD tried to create the easiest game possible. Just as Warcraft 3 was an "easier" version of BW which then led to MOBAs which then led to the "easy" LoL. Almost all genres have been continuously made easier over the past decade and nothing about that will change anytime soon.
which is because video games have become more popular among crowds of people who enjoy gaming as a casual and noncompetitive hobby and doesn't in any way represent some sort of "decay" as geeky self-obsessed elitists want to have you believe. SC2 is still healthy and playable at a competitive level both for pros and amateurs, so there's no excuse for whining that more and more people are becoming interested in games considered "easier" or somehow "inferior" other than wanting to exalt yourself over something as meaningless as video game "skills"
Agreed. People are obsessed with dividing the gaming communities into little tribes of increasingly hardcore players, each one claiming that their game is the most hardest core. And people confuse games in inaccessible walls of shit with being "deep" and "not for casuals". But elitism is nothing new on the Internet.
On April 04 2014 02:03 NukeD wrote: ^ Why you attack him? Is he wrong?
I wasn't, that's why I said agreed. Are you confused?
I meant the guy he quotted.
Oh, because that is fucking stupid and just people just claim their game is more hardcore and requires more "skill" so they can be elitest. No one claims that archery is harder than gold or sailing is harder then running a marathon. It's Internet try hards flexing their e muscles and saying "do you even lift bro?"
The only problem with his post in my opinion is where he apparently equalls the quallity of games depending on how "easy" they are. That is stupid. I do however agree with him that the quallity of games is diminshing as years pass, while the games being easy/hard themselves is a non factor and I couldnt care less about it.
On April 04 2014 02:03 NukeD wrote: ^ Why you attack him? Is he wrong?
I wasn't, that's why I said agreed. Are you confused?
I meant the guy he quotted.
Oh, because that is fucking stupid and just people just claim their game is more hardcore and requires more "skill" so they can be elitest. No one claims that archery is harder than gold or sailing is harder then running a marathon. It's Internet try hards flexing their e muscles and saying "do you even lift bro?"
I agree that it is not productive to do these kind of arguments, but i also disagree with these real sports examples. Computer games (pc) ALL use the same tools for their "discipline", mouse and keyboard. It is rather easy to use some criteria and compare the mechanical skill for video games. Ofc you would have to include the strategical part aswell somehow. But yeah in the end it doesn't really matter
EPT
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