The Hottest Esports Games Right Now

Esports is much, much bigger than you might imagine. Newzoo, a company dedicated to the gaming industry insights and analytics, estimates that esports generates over $1 billion annually with an audience in excess of 165 million viewers. These numbers are staggering when you consider they are starting to compete with traditional sports, not even considering the money the actual games are making for their creators. What games are bringing viewers to the esports broadcasts and which have the biggest followings? Let’s find out!

League of Legends

It’s only fitting that the first game on our list is a MOBA. League of Legends is now 11 years old, first seeing release from developer Riot Games in 2009, and features peak viewership numbers of close to 4 million during the League of Legends Worlds competition in 2019. It’s also the most played game on PC with a player base exceeding 100 million players. While the peak viewership record was shattered this year by the Formula One Virtual Grand Prix, League of Legends continues to be the most watched esports game, as it has been consistently over the last decade.

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Counter Strike: Global Offensive

Counter Strike Global Offensive (known more commonly as CSGO) is a first-person shooter in which two teams of 5 compete in a round-based format to be the first team to win 15 rounds. It was released in 2012 and was created by Valve Software. Ignoring some smaller region-specific releases, it’s the fourth iteration of the game that follows on from previous releases in the series, starting from Counter Strike in 1999 which wasn’t a full game, but a mod for Half Life. Today, the game easily reaches 200,000 viewers on professional games, with a viewership record of 1.2 million from the IEM Katowice competition in 2019. Unsurprisingly, it’s the second most played game on PC too.

Fortnite

Fortnite is the newest entry in the list, having first seen the light of day in 2017 when it was released by Epic Games as a free-to-play battle royale game. It remains free to this day and features cartoonish visual styles and some innovations to the battle royale genre that fans of the game love. Because of the sheer scale required for competitions (each game features up to 100 players), they are not as common as other games, but the 2019 Fortnite World Cup held by Epic Games saw 2.3 million people tune in to watch. Unlike League of Legends and CSGO, Fortnite is available on PlayStation, Xbox and even mobile, so it’s comfortably the biggest game in the world right now when you count its player base, but it doesn’t achieve the highest viewership numbers for its esports competitions.

Dota 2

When you want to talk about real money in esports prize pools, you are almost sure to mention Dota 2, with its record-breaking prize pools which grow each year. In 2019, this prize pool toppled all expectations, reaching a staggering $34 million. The Dota 2 fanbase is one of the most loyal and the game sees very strong support as a competitive title despite not having the biggest viewership numbers with only just over 1 million people tuning in to The International 2019 which saw first placed Team OG win $15 million dollars, or $3.1 million each. This is a prize bigger than winning Wimbledon ($2.9 million) and The Masters ($2 million). The prize pool gets so big thanks to the way it’s raised via crowd sourcing. A portion of all sales in the game go towards the competition’s prize pool each year.

Honorable Mention: The Formula One Virtual Grand Prix

For many fans of esports, 2020 is likely going to be remembered as the year of the racing simulator, with popular news site Esports Observer noting that despite the costs buying a setup worthy of competing in the genre, it has slowly been building a following until this year. Because of the suspension of the big motor racing competitions on the back pf the Coronavirus restrictions globally, fans of the sport turned to virtual competitions to get their fix.

Thanks in no small part to the official Formula 1 Virtual Grand Prix and the support received from the industry, simulation racing has seen a huge rise in both viewers and players. The Formula 1 Virtual Grand Prix saw a record-breaking 30 million views across the platforms it was broadcast on. Popular footballers, music stars and even professional drivers took to the virtual circuits during, before and after the event.

Whichever game you choose to support or even play yourself, the esports scene is dynamic and ever changing with new games falling in and out of favor constantly. Even games based on real life sports like Formula one and football maintain strong followings globally, showing the power of the esports ecosystem.