TWITCH TOP 10 WEEK OF OCT 15TH: LEAGUE OF LEGENDS REMAINS ON TOP
Twitch Top 10 Week of Oct 15th: League of Legends Remains On Top (Photo: Riot Games)
By Feature Writer Jordan Fragen
TNL Take: Welcome back. Without further ado, let’s get right into this past week's Top 10 Games on Twitch.
Twitch Top 10: Week Of October 15th (Graphic: Waypoint Media)
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League of Legends Tops The Charts Again
All eyes were back on League of Legends this week as the knockout stage began at the 2017 World Championships. Worlds has never been a particularly exuberant time for NA and EU fans as their teams struggle to match the skill of their Korean and Chinese counterparts.
The match that took place between EU based Misfits and South Korean powerhouse SKT1 (who have won 3 of the last 4 years) in the early morning hours of October 20th was widely regarded to be the best match of the tournament so far. SKT1 ended up taking the set, but there appears to be a bright future for this young EU Misfits roster. However, none of the EU or NA teams will advance to the semifinals so prepare yourself for the ultimate showdowns between the best teams from the only parts of the world that excel at League of Legends South Korea and China.
But let’s take a look at the numbers. Did you think that League of Legends did well last week?
You haven’t seen anything yet.
While the Viewer Hours, Hours Streamed and Average Concurrents remained relatively similar to last week (not a surprise considering this looks at aggregated data), the Maximum Concurrent Viewers peaked at almost 840K.
That’s an increase of 64% from last week.
Think the growth is just due to the increased quality of matches? Guess again. Compared to the first week of the Knockout stage in 2016, Peak Concurrent Viewership increased 36% and Unique Viewers increased 43%.
League of Legends is still thriving and I can only assume next week will tell a tale of continued success. Be sure to check back here next week for more info.
South Park and Warframe Outdo Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
South Park: The Fractured by Whole follows 2014's The Stick of Truth (Photo: Ubisoft)
Ubisoft’s latest entry into their South Park series and the latest expansion for Digital Extreme’s Warframe both dropped this week.
However both outperformed Valve’s mainstay Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Let’s take a look a both of these games individually.
South Park’s success may not be a total shock. However, what probably pushed it to 6th was the large number of sponsored high-profile streams that took place. Many of Twitch’s top streamers such as lirik, Joshog, timthetatman, dansgaming, and forsenlol (all in the top 100 most followed on the site) streamed the game. This also likely took hours from CS:GO as all of these streamers are known to play CS:GO too. In all, it appears that Ubisoft’s marketing budget went to good use.
However, this does not appear to be the case for Warframe. Originally released in 2013-2014 depending on your platform of choice, the game’s latest expansion Plains of Eidolon dropped on Friday, October 13th. But Digital Extreme’s marketing strategy was much more community oriented, which makes sense given the game’s online cooperative nature. For the first two weeks after launch, the publisher plans to reward players for watching streams of the game with free loot.
Marketing strategy aside, it will be interesting to see if CS:GO's numbers recover next week.