The latest major in Counter-Strike was more watched on streaming platform Twitch than the finals of Riot’s League Championship Series (LCS) or any other event in the past year.
That’s according to a chart released by Gamoloco, a website dedicated to tracking data from live streaming platforms such as Twitch.
The numbers concern ESL Cologne, one of Counter-Strike’s annual major tournaments, which ended this weekend with a Fnatic victory. The event saw more than 1.2 million concurrent viewers during peak times. More than that, fans consumed nearly nine million hours of broadcast content from the event on Saturday alone. That’s compared to a peak of just over six million hours for the LCS finals on Sunday.
Gamoloco
Even the weekday group stage broadcasts from Cologne were more watched than one of the biggest days of the year on the League of Legends calendar. But there are a few caveats top the above statistics.
The ESL event packs more matches into each day of the tournament and also features continuous rebroadcasts of each day’s games, allowing each individual viewer the chance to watch more bulk hours than two LCS finals, each a single series between two teams. The numbers on the chart are also specific to Twitch, and as such don’t take into account those streaming services predominantly used in such countries as China where League of Legends is wildly popular.
The numbers are still impressive, and are demonstrative of the continued growth of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in especially the Western audience. The next step will be to see if 2015’s final major at DreamHack Winter can push these figures even further forward.
