Last week on Twitch, Fortnite continued to soar past PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS and is now looking to overtake League of Legends, while Overwatch League’s viewer rewards helped return the game to the Top 10.

Every week, The Esports Observer breaks down the most watched Twitch content from a curated list of more than 35,000 channels, and analyzes the major esports 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.

Fortnite Has Solidified its Lead Over PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, but Will It Soon Rocket Past League of Legends?



For months, PUBG and Fortnite have battled over the battle royale genre. While PUBG had a solid lead, the momentum shifted into Fortnite’s favor back in September 2017. This week, Epic Games’ cartoony entry has clearly demonstrated its dominance on Twitch, thanks in part to a patch released on Feb. 22 that saw additional content released for the title.

This strategy of small, consistent releases appears to be paying off for Fortnite, especially compared to PUBG’s larger but infrequent release schedule.

Compared to last week, Fortnite has increased its stats across the board. The most notable gains are a 16 percent increase in the average concurrent viewers and a 17 percent increase in the total hours watched. These double digit gains contrast against a loss of between 2 and 4 percent across the board for PUBG.

With all of the momentum continuing in favor of Fortnite, the game’s next great milestone needs to set its aspirations higher. Beyond a brief eclipse by PUBG in August 2017, League of Legends has owned the top spot on Twitch since the early days of the site.

Had this peak come a week sooner, Fortnite’s 18.2M hours watched would have taken the top spot from LoL, which brought in 18.1M the previous week. This shift seems unlikely now that more of Riot Games’ regional leagues have begun their first season of 2018, but on its current pace Fortnite is bound to keep pace.

Related Article: Vietnam Becomes Its Own Competitive Region in League of Legends

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Rises Again Thanks to StarSeries



CS:GO continued its momentum into this week, seeing a large increase in the number of hours watched on Twitch, as is typical when large CS:GO event takes place. Continuing out of the previous week’s unfinished swiss rounds for the Season 4 finals of StarLadder’s StarSeries i-League, this first half of last week was dedicated to finalizing the single elimination bracket for the top eight teams, which followed during the weekend.

While some top tier organizations such as Fnatic and Cloud9 fell apart before making it into the bracket, all major regions saw a representative in the top eight. This ensured that most fans still had a home team to root for deep into the tournament, likely supporting a near 50 percent increase in viewership compared to the previous week.

While North America’s Team Liquid continued its hot streak after a win at the CS Summit in early February, they fell just short of making it to the finals against the ultimate winner, EU representative mousesports. Evidence of Team Liquid’s demise can be seen in the higher peak concurrent viewership for the Russian language stream, starladder5, as the final was a close fought match between mousesports and long time CIS-favorite Natus Vincere.

Dota 2 sees a boost from ESL One Katowice



Much like fellow Valve title CS:GO, Dota 2 typically sees a boost in viewership with major tournaments. While IEM Katowice, which is operated by ESL, is gearing up for this coming weekend, Valve’s MOBA saw the limelight during ESL One Katowice this past weekend.

Notably, this is the second Dota 2 tournament that fell under the exclusive partnership between ESL and Facebook. The first tournament to fall under this deal, ESL One Genting, was held in January and brought major controversy over fans broadcasting the games on Twitch via DotaTV. As a result of this deal and the subsequent crackdown on fans attempting to subvert it, the only official option for fans to watch the English or Portuguese broadcast was to use Facebook. Of course, these hours are not included in this analysis and, as a result, the hours on Twitch capture only a portion of the hours watched for the weekend.

However, the Russian language stream on Twitch was enough to help Dota 2 take the No. 4 spot on this list.

The Start of Stage 2 Brings Overwatch into No. 6



After a week long break from the OWL and the Top 10 list, Overwatch returns at No. 6. This is fairly unsurprising as Overwatch League continues to drive a large portion of all hours spent watching the Blizzard title.

This week alone, the official Overwatch League channels brought in a whopping 4.4M hours, roughly 55 percent of Overwatch’s 8.0M total. 3.9M of these 4.4M can be directly attributed to the main English Broadcast, enough to make it the second most watched channel on Twitch in the last week. This is only behind Twitch’s newest star Tyler “Ninja” Blevins who almost exclusively streamed Fortnite.

Some of this viewership boost may be attributable to the newly introduced viewer rewards. The goal of which is to incentivize Overwatch players to tune into the matches in order to unlock exclusive in-game skins, emotes, and team-themed items.

Overall, the Overwatch League continues to be a success story on many fronts for both Blizzard and Twitch who paid a reported $90 million over two years for global exclusivity outside of China.

Streamers Continue to Drive Hearthstone Viewership, Not Esports



While Hearthstone continues to be one of the most popular titles on Twitch, it’s definitely not due to its own official tournaments. This week saw both the start of the Hearthstone Collegiate Champs and the entire HCT Sydney Stop Invitational tournament.

Both tournaments were hosted on Blizzard’s official Hearthstone channel and even then, the channel was only the fourth most-watched among all Hearthstone broadcasters. Instead, well-known personalities Octavian “Kripparrian” Morosan and Jeremy “DisguisedToast” Wang drove over 158 percent and 135 percent the amount of traffic of Hearthstone’s esports endeavors.

This is somewhat unsurprising as most of the game’s biggest stars are not known as esports players. Despite being signed to TSM, Kripparrian is better known for his skill at the unconventional Arena format, which is not seen in tournament play. However, Thijs “Thijs” Molendijk is a top level player, currently signed to G2 Esports.

The Twitch Content Round-Up uses data collected from TEO Audience Insights. You can learn more about the platform and discover more streaming and social media stats yourself by clicking here.