Riot Games keeps growing regardless of the hate from gamers who do not enjoy their main game, League of Legends.
While some changes forced some players to drop the game, it has also welcomed new ones.
They keep breaking record after record. Their Worlds Finals 2019 stream broke multiple all-high records on Twitch and other platforms. Gamers from all over the world tuned in to watch the League of Legends World Championship Finals between the Chinese representative, Fun Plus Phoenix, and the Europe representative, G2 Esports.
Riot Games outperforms by a considerable margin other games in the esports industry, such as World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Heroes of the Storm, Warcraft. Even Dota2 outside of the International Period is steadily dropped to lower spots in terms of viewership.
The weekly matches also drive viewership on the Riot Games channel streamed from major regions, such as the North American League Championship Series and the European League European Championship Series. These two alone make up a significant chunk of viewership due to the multiple days of the week streamed.
While in the previous year, Riot Games achieved 102 million hours watched, this year it had a small increase of up to 112 million hours watched. This increase was primarily driven by the franchised system for the European League. The franchising attracted multiple organizations from other sports, such as FC Schalke 04, eXcel Esports, which drew a ton of non-gamer viewers to the scene as well.
Also, the World Championship stream brought many more viewers compared to last year. The channel which streamed the World Championship peaked at 560,000 last year but managed to surpass 640,000 viewers this year.
The increase in hours watched wasn’t strictly positive for Riot, though. Hours watched increases also came with an increase to airtime resulting in a slight decrease to average viewership.
In 2018, Riot had the second most-watched channel on Twitch behind only Ninja, who has since left Twitch in favor of an exclusive deal to stream on Microsoft’s streaming platform Mixer. Even before Ninja left the platform in August, however, he wasn’t on the same level that he was last year. Riot Games was already outperforming the crazy-haired Fortnite player who was seeing a year-over-year dip in viewership as he spent less time streaming and more time expanding his brand with non-endemic partnerships and appearances.
Will Riot Games break new records with the upcoming, announced games or will League of Legends finally die as many competitors wait for it to do so?
