Almost 50% of people watching eSports don't play the game

>Looking at the combined fanbase of the top three global esports franchises (League of Legends, CS:GO, and Dota 2), we see that 23% of the fanbase (both players and viewers) in the 10 Western countries watch esports content of these games but do not play the games. This means that 42% of these esports viewers don’t play the game they watch. For these franchises, players have often moved on to other games or spend their time elsewhere, while staying invested in the professional competitive gaming scene. Esports gives lapsed game enthusiasts an outlet to still enjoy the entertainment provided by games without having to develop or keep up with the skills required to play.

archive.is/dTFH8

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Like football fans?

3 games have almost 30% share of all PC games. I knew they were popular but damn,

Yeah, that's why it's a big deal. Esports has been criticized as never being able to become a spectator sport, with the argument that you have to play the game for it to be interesting to watch.

Compare with say football where the majority don't actually play it, but still watch it. This basically trumps that argument.

>twitch faggots don't play vidya

wew surprise

It's not a distinct share. People can play all three games. You don't think there isn't a signfiicant number of people on Steam that play Dota 2 AND Counter-Strike GO?

The only thing that's interesting is that Counter-Strike trends higher than Dota 2 in some cases proportionally despite Dota 2 dwarfing CS's playerbase.

But an FPS is more interesting to watch, admittedly.

>eSports
>Hearthstone
?

That's crazy that over 50% of people who watch e-sports actually play the games. With football it's probably less than 1%

I never knew this until recently. Friends were talking about League matches and I asked them for their tags, only one of them had one. The other didn't because she said it looked like it was too hard to play.

She fucking lucked out, I'm a slave to this shitty fucking game.

Playing the game certainly makes it easier to follow the match but isn't a requirement. Football is deeply enough ingrained into our culture that we can follow a match without having ever played that sport ourselves and vidya is getting closer and closer to that every single day.

Makes sense to me for hearthstone.
The game itself is too much bullshit to play it yourself.

People play soccer. Not at a competitive level, maybe, but you've probably played it casually with friends or at school or something.

The thing that makes it weird is that the barrier of entry for video games is much lower. To play football like the pros do, you'd need a field of equivalent size, an equivalent number of people to actually make sizable teams, equipment like the helmets and shit. That's a hell of a lot of coordination.

Compare the MOBAs. They are free to play. CS:GO costs $15. That's trivial. Maybe you're not playing at the same level at the pros, but you're still playing the same game they are. 5 vs 5 on dust2 or whatever.

Hearthstone is very strangely the only game Blizzard didn't fuck up trying to make into an eSport. I don't get it either, but it's statistically significant.

>CS:GO has the biggest amount of viewers only
Could see that happening, my brother was a fan from the 1.6 days and he seems to enjoy watching competitive

because the skin and gambling stuff.

how bad is it anyways? I am aware it caused a shitstorm last year, still happening?

Does Dota have the same loot crate reward system for watching streams that CSGO does? I imagine a decent amount of viewers are just there for that. The economy/gambling scene in CS is much larger than in Dota, if you look at CSGO's steamcharts you can see it lose a couple hundred thousand players the instant Valve had to crack down on gambling.

Valve's cracking down because of state courts.

>cardstone is an esport
About as much as playing slots.

>overwatch confirmed for actual game people will actually play
vee btfo holy shit

>Half of the people don't care about e-sports

People really are better than I expected

>including Overwatch and Heartstone when they have relatively small competitive scenes and weren't designed for serious competitive play

>PC and Console

Counter-Strike's probably the most fun to watch since it has the "cleanest" action and the ruleset is simple to understand(shoot people until they die).

Compare that to the MOBAs where you need to be a little more familiar with all the mechanics.

Well I don't play fighting games anymore and I never played Starcraft 2 but I do occasionally watch tournaments.

I don't know how anybody can be hardcore into watching this esports stuff though.

>viewers only 26%
>non playing share 47%
???

Total viewers: 26+29=55
% viewers that don't play: 26/55=47%

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You ain't smart at math are you?

Wow you are saying that more than half of the people really play those assfaggots? Watching it as white noise just because it's popular is ok, really liking this shit is pretty sad

>to play football like the pros do
>implying people don't get with their friends for a 3v3 in any sport they feel like

I used to watch Starcraft casts all the time and haven never played any of the series.

>little more familiar
You cant be, theres too many characters and the meta is a fucking mystery. Professional analysts cant keep up with it.

you'd be suprised how many people dont know what the fuck is going on in baseball and football. they are very complicated compared to something like soccer

>no fighting games listed

let's be real, fighting games are like 80% viewers

I watch some of TI with my friends when I don't even play Dota, but one of my friends is 6k and it's real handy as he can explain shit

They are also not really big enough to be statistically significant. Look at the twitch rankings, Injustice is only high as it is for obvious reasons and that'll crater in due time.