According to business reports, esports annual economic growth is about 20%. However our statistics tells that the amount of viewers is growing much faster, March 2018 is the best proof of this.

According to our statistics March 2018 can be called one of the most successful month in esports history, if not the most successful. The five most popular tournaments gathered more than ten million viewers at the peak at once.

The Chinese League of Legends league LPL Spring 2018 as always took the first place — it always collects a multi-million audience. In the same time March statistics is very unusual. PlayerUnknown’s Battleground tournaments took the second and the fourth place in the list of the most popular tournaments: StarSeries i-League PUBG and PGL PUBG Spring Invitational. We have already written an article a week ago about PUBG as an esports discipline — you should read it. PlayerUnknown’s Battleground is growing significantly, mostly because of the Chinese viewers.

Dota 2 Asia Championship is a major Dota 2 tournament. It attracted a large amount of the Chinese viewers due to participation of the six Chinese teams out of eighteen participants. It is also hosted in Shanghai. There were only group stage in March, that is why we expect a significant grow in the number of viewers, since five Chinese teams reached the playoffs.

King Pro League Spring happened in March — King of Glory tournament. We could observe a huge popularization of this discipline several months ago, but in January amount of viewers dropped significantly. As you can see, King of Glory returned to the big game of esports in Spring.

March statistics is quite unusual even without the Chinese viewers. IEM Katowice 2018, a large CSGO tournament, took the first place. But a really huge amount of viewers gathered only the final between Fnatic and FaZe.

Japanese Internet TV service AbemaTV launched a new channel on 21 January 2018 — Ultra Games. Out team decided to add this channel to out database. That was a very good decision.

Shadowverse is a very popular card game in Japan. The final of the Rage Spring 2018 ended on 21 March 2018, it gathered more than 500.000 of the Japanese viewers at the peak. The playoffs of LJL Spring, the Japanese League of Legends league, will begin in April and AbemaTV will broadcast it. It will be interesting to look at the next month’s statistics!

The North American league NA LCS Spring and the Korean LCK Spring also took place in our list of the most popular events and tournaments. The viewership of the European league EU LCS Spring was bigger on average than LCK Spring, however the match between legendary SK Telecom T1 and KSV eSports attracted the attention of the world’s community.

Bucharest Major gathered so many people primarily because of the CIS community — the biggest part of viewers watched the game on the Russian-speaking broadcast.

List of the most popular English-speaking broadcasts look the most classic among all other. Here we can see the most popular League of Legends leagues and the biggest CSGO tournament of the month — IEM Katowice. It is also necessary to congratulate Blizzard — the maximum peak of Overwatch League grown on 30.000 viewers in comparison with the previous month.

Dota 2! A lot of Dota 2! In the same time we have one unusual nominee — World of Tanks took the fifth place. The question is “how?” if Wargaming closed the esports division of their game? Developers hosted a “Clan Brawl” in March — a huge event for the community between the biggest clans with 15x15 battle format, official standings and ingame gold prize pool.

Many popular streamers and bloggers joined the tournament and broadcasted their game online, thereby attracting the attention of the whole community to the event. Considering the huge success of the “Clan Brawl” Wargaming will likely begin to hold such events regularly.

The top most popular channels of March on Twitch cost no surprises, except that the presence of the Russian-language channel twitch.tv/pgl_dota2ru - the Russian team Virtus.Pro was in the focus of the Russian-speaking community.