Katowice 2015

@efekarakus
Efe Karakus

In this article, we take a look at viewership numbers of ESL One for CS:GO and IEM for League of Legends. We break down how much time was spent watching games, breaks, and analysis.

ESL One Katowice

In the area chart below, we display the viewership numbers for every day of the CS:GO major. Starting from the finals going down to the group stages. We only kept track of the esl_csgo Twitch channel.

From this chart we can estimate the popularity of teams. For example, if we look at the March 12th (Group Stage) chart we can see that the Natus Vincere vs. Fnatic match had more viewers than the Natus Vincere vs. Vox Eminor match. The common team in both situations is Natus Vincere, so it would be reasonable to assume that Fnatic has more fans than Vox Eminor.

Intel Extreme Masters

In the area chart below, we display the viewership numbers for every day of the LoL tournament. Starting from the finals going down to the group stages. We only kept track of the esl_lol Twitch channel.

We can observe the popularity of TSM by looking at the semi finals. Their games have significantly more viewers than the GE Tigers vs. Team WE games, which were considered one of the biggest upsets in the history of League of Legends.

CS:GO seems to be also getting more and more popular in the West. The highest peak during the CS:GO finals is larger than the peak of the LoL finals.

Insights

- Retention

The number of viewers whenever a game is played is increasing. Every game played in this tournament except the Cloud9 vs. TSM match in the group stages of ESL One had an increasing viewership trend. This most likely suggests that games have a high retention rate. Viewers don't leave a game after starting to watch it. They tend to stick through the whole show. Also, more viewers seem to join the broadcast as the game is played.

- Time Breakdown

Here we display the amount of time spent watching games, analysis, and breaks over the two events.

ESL One Katowice

Intel Extreme Masters

The CS:GO major spanned a total of 37 hours over 4 days. We spent half of the time watching games, whereas the other half was breaks and analysis. The League of Legends event was almost 25 hours long and we spent 56 % of time watching games. Therefore, for both of the ESL events a spectator spent almost as much time watching games as watching out of the game content.

Methodology

The viewer counts represent only the numbers from the esl_csgo, and esl_lol Twitch channels. We chose these channels specifically because they represented the major channels for people to watch the CS:GO and LoL events. However, the actual total number of viewers for this event is much higher as ESL provided channels in other languages and even PoV channels for CS:GO. We retrieved the number of viewers through the Twitch API by making a request every minute during the period of the tournament.

We kept track of the duration of breaks, analysis, and gameplay manually by watching the VoDs on Twitch.

It should be noted that we lost internet connection on March 13th around 1pm. Therefore, we don't have all the viewership numbers for that day. However, the time length for games, breaks, and analysis have been tracked thoroughly.

Cover picture and team logos taken from ESL One and Intel Extreme Masters webpages.