Fan Trends

Esports Consumers

This week, Newzoo published a consumer research piece into a few of the top esports titles across 12 markets in North America and Europe. According to Newzoo, the esports audience worldwide will reach 443M this year, made up of 197M enthusiasts (more than 1x/mo engagement) and 245M occasional viewers (1x/mo or less). Below are three charts and the takeaways I found the most interesting in each:

• 71% of fans only watch one of these 3 esports (LoL, CS:GO, OW)
• League of Legends has the largest reach at 23% of all esports viewers
• CS:GO doesn’t have a franchised league, unlike LoL and Overwatch
• When these games started: CS:GO (1999), LoL (2009), Overwatch (2016)

Franchise Fans: players & viewers

• 10%+ of their esports audiences only watch and don’t play the game
• Overwatch is hard to watch: they have the highest % who only play at 54%
• LoL is easy to watch: 42% play + watch, 26% only watch
• PC is the dominant platform for competitive gaming, unlikely to change

China: demographics and their preferences

• Avg. age in China is higher than you think: 28 years old (same in the U.S.)
• League of Legends fans like cars but not gardening (73% men, 27% women)
• Dota2 fans like board games but not shopping (57% men, 43% women)
• Honor of Kings fans like shopping but not tech and science (56% men, 44% women)

Ninja & Fortnite - Fortnite viewership has not been affected by Ninja leaving Twitch for Mixer (121k average viewers in July compared to 126k so far in August). Ninja may have amassed 2M subs (free, no credit card up front) but Fortnite viewers, instead of leaving Twitch for Mixer, are leaving Ninja for other Twitch streamers.

In July, TimTheTatman and Dr Lupo, two of the most popular Fortnite streamers on Twitch, had average viewership metrics of 19k and 7k, respectively. In August, their numbers are up to 31k and 11k, respectively. Ninja may be cashing in (rumored $50-100M deal), but it doesn’t look like Twitch should be too worried.

Esports Job Monitor - looking at HitmarkerJobs, a prominent esports job posting website, we did a quick analysis of the ~1,300 active job listings and bucketed them into a few categories to produce the below chart and takeaways:

• Technology hiring is the largest category at 27% of job postings (this matches well with our thesis that the best way to invest in this space is in tech companies)
• Only 4% of the job listings are in the “Events” category, showing that there is a greater push online/digitally than in physical/in-person events right now.

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