SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Call it competitive gaming, eSports, or just big business. "The big events are already bigger than the biggest events in sports," says Twitch COO Kevin Lin:
The industry is anchored by what is referred to as multiplayer online battle arena games, like the League of Legends, where one or several players face off in a digital arena. Watching people play professionally has been popular in Asia for years, but is now also gaining steam in the U.S.
In fact, those powering the industry say it's well on its way to becoming the next major professional sport alongside football and baseball. The biggest tournaments are already filling entire arenas, including New York City's Madison Square Garden.
The average Twitch user spends two hours a day engaging with the site. Lin said it's not unusual for some users to stretch to the five-hour mark for some of the more popular players and events. In total, Twitch logs more than 100 million unique viewers a month, with those viewers racking up a collective 20 billion minutes of viewing time of the more than 11 million videos that are broadcast. The Twitch app has been downloaded more than 23 million times since its launch in 2011.
In 2014, Riot Games' League of Legends world championship had roughly 27 million streaming views, more than the average viewership of the individual games of the World Series and roughly the same as the amount of people that tuned in for this year's NCAA final.
Last month, ESPN 2 made history by airing the finals of Blizzard Entertainment's collegiate "Heroes of the Dorm" competition on TV for the first time.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday May 31 2015, @11:20AM
had roughly 27 million streaming views, more than the average viewership of the individual games of the World Series
There are two other issues, one is the age of the average baseball viewer is 50+ and rising more than a year every year, and I'm guessing FPS games trend a bit lower. So there are certain inevitable outcomes. I remember a running joke or subplot or whatever in ST:DS9 that someday the last major league baseball game would be played to a mere 1000 fans or whatever. Well, thats coming sooner than you'd think.
The other issue is popularity. If you pull the graphs, which I have done although not recently, about 2/3 of the population has been a self described baseball fan on a horizontal unchanging line since the 50s. Whats collapsed is participation, from something ridiculous like 1/4 of the living human population of the country in the 50s listened to or watched the world series, down to basically nobody but the sports nerds unless its being held in your home town or "your" team is one of the participants, well over 19 outta 20, and rapidly dropping, won't watch or listen to the world series. None the less the graph of "I'm a fan" is utterly flat, even though people have stopped watching. I'm sure the ratios are wildly different for FPS twitch games and the 1 in 15 who claim to be fans probably near 100% watch the biggest tournaments.
I watch minecraft videos which is kinda on topic sorta. Given how shitty some documentation is for some mods, its possibly the best way to learn how to use them or get interesting ideas. Its a huge waste of time where 250K people watch a half hour video because nobody is motivated enough to replace it with a one page summary, which is a pretty lame use of human effort. Also its occasionally interesting.