PLAYERUNKNOWN’s BATTLEGROUNDS remains on top, while League of Legends enters a short lull before the World Championship gets underway. Meanwhile CS:GO just misses the Twitch Top 5, despite ESL New York 2017 being the most watched esport event.

Every week, The Esports Observer breaks down the most watched Twitch content, and analyzes the major esport competitions, events and news affecting video game streaming. The titles are ranked according to the total number of hours watched for each title, from Monday to the following Sunday, with data compiled using TEO Audience Insights.

The arrows signal whether a game has risen or fallen in the rankings.

1. PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS (-0.4 M)





A marginal decrease in the viewership for PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS is hardly enough to nudge it off of the top spot. In fact, the only major change from last week is that Jaryd “summit1g” Lazar finally managed to end Michael “shroud” Grzesiek’s four-week reign as the most watched streamer, and even then, it was only by about 60,000 total hours of viewership.

PUBG seems to be breaking more milestones by the day. According to data from the website Steam charts, the Battle Royale shooter has now surpassed every other title on the platform in terms of maximum concurrent player count. At 1.4 million, it even topped the previous record holder, Dota 2, which had 1.3 million. Bluehole Studio’s success has even brought a few imitators out of the woodwork, with Epic Games developing a PUBG-style survival mode into their co-op sandbox title Fortnite, while Cambridge developer Automaton gets to work on their own 1000 player alternative.

2. League of Legends (- 1.1 M)





With the League of Legends World Championship play-in stage opener starting on September 23rd, the usual pool of streamers hiked up the numbers…well, mostly usual. Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, arguably the most well known LoL player in the world, only streams periodically, but since the beginning of this month he’s been logging on to showcase his games more than in the last two months.

In fourth place we had the service “Tracking the Pros”, which showcases the individual streams of LoL pros as they practice in solo queue. On the Up Media channel, there was the only significant League of Legends esports event of the week – the “Heroes Union” 2017 competition, which saw the Taiwanese team Ahq Fighter take their winning share from a 1 million Taiwan New Dollar (roughly $30,000) prize.

3. Hearthstone (-0.8 M)





Now in the run up to its Summer championship, last week we saw the conclusion to the Hearthstone Asia-Pacific playoffs, plus the North America playoffs. Combined, the competitions still fell below Hearthstone’s best streamers. This includes the newcomer top performer Vladislav “Silvername” Sinotov, who still emerged on top this week despite a decrease in total hours watched from the week before.

As of September 18, numerous long-standing favourite cards within the Hearthstone meta have been severely “nerfed”. This will lead to a new round of deck-building and experimentation, and we’ll follow up the effect this has on the digital card game’s viewership next week.

4. Destiny 2 (+ 0.1 M)





Unlike most other non-esports titles that break into the Twitch Top 5, the online-only multiplayer FPS Destiny 2 not only stuck around, but tepidly increased its numbers from the week before. The Bungie title’s top streamer, KingGothalion, even increased his viewership from last week by 500,000 hours of viewership, emerging as the top non-PUBG-playing streamer of last week.

5. Dota 2 (+ 1.1 M)





ESL One New York might have pushed CS:GO into the top five, were it not for last week’s biggest Dota 2 competition: the Starladder i-League Invitational Qualifier. The third season of this competition, which branches over several regions, is the very first LAN event in the new Dota 2 competitive season (now to be referred to as the “Dota 2 Professional Circuit”). The competition’s conclusion, which takes place between October 11-15, will be the first Valve-sponsored Minor of the year, where 300 qualifying points for next year’s International will be up for grabs alongside a $300,000 prize pool.

Honourable Mentions: