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A lot of people tuned in to watch a very short series as the League of Legends World Championship reached a somewhat anticlimactic conclusion.
With no Tyler “Ninja” Blevins on the platform, and intermittent broadcasts from Turner “Tfue” Tenney, Fortnite streamers have gone from a staple on the Top 10 to an occassional occurrence.
Instead, new names are able to ride the waves of big releases. This week, long-time Hearthstone streamer Octavian “Kripparrian” Morosan gained a big boost in viewership from the game’s new auto-battler mode, Hearthstone Battlegrounds.
The following content is ranked according to the total number of hours watched on Twitch from Monday to the following Sunday, with data compiled using TEO Access.
Riot Reaches Over 600K Viewers
The League of Legends World Championship (Worlds 2019) concluded yesterday in Paris, France, with one last match between the top seeds from China and Europe – FunPlus Phoenix and G2 Esports, respectively.
This was a highly anticipated matchup, particularly for a Twitch audience largely comprised of Western viewers, who were hoping to see a European team take home the Worlds title for the first time since 2011. The main Riot Games channel alone reached 673.52K max concurrent viewers (CCV), with more viewers tuning in across alternate language channels as well as other platforms like YouTube.
However, FunPlus Phoenix was victorious in a fairly lopsided match, taking a quick 3-0 win. This meant that the broadcast was significantly shorter than previous weeks, such that the main channel produced just 2.82M hours watched.
No Fortnite Streamers to be Found
Throughout 2018, the Top 10 was frequently filled with Fortnite streamers, and consistently topped by the game’s biggest name – Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. Recently, while Fortnite remains a top-three category on Twitch week in and week out, there have been a number of recent weeks without a single Fortnite-focused channel in the Top 10. Turner “Tfue” Tenney had previously appeared to be Blevins’ natural successor, but his recent intermittent streaming schedule has caused a significant drop in viewership. Last week, Tenney accumulated just 587.95K hours watched – Well below the over 2M he could regularly produce over the summer.
With Tenney on the decline, it appears viewers are beginning to look elsewhere rather than jumping onto the next big name in Fortnite. Félix “xQc” Lengyel leapt into that gap this week, generating 1.77M hours watched primarily streaming under the “Just Chatting” category.
To Battle!
Another major move this week came from one of the leading Hearthstone streamers, Octavian “Kripparrian” Morosan. Recently, Hearthstone lost a number of its most prominent streamers who all made the jump to focus on auto-battlers like Riot Games’ Teamfight Tactics. This week, however, many of those streamers returned to the game as Blizzard Entertainment introduced its own entry into the auto-battler genre, Hearthstone Battlegrounds. Interest in the new mode allowed Morosan to reach 1.68M hours watched.
Auto-battlers are still a young genre, and as such, predicting their success has proven difficult, but new game modes are an excellent way to ward off both player and viewer fatigue for a game. It remains to be seen whether Battlegrounds will be the draw that brings big streamers back to Hearthstone, or if it’s simply the latest fad in a new, rapidly evolving genre.
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