The International 2018 helps Dota 2 unseat Fortnite as the most watched game on Twitch, while World of Warcraft retains a spot amongst the top five games.

The following titles are ranked according to the total number of hours watched on Twitch, from Monday to the following Sunday, with data compiled using TEO Audience Insights.

The Esports Tournament That Toppled Fortnite



Fortnite has remained at the number one spot of our Twitch Top 10 list since February of this year. This is due to its extremely high streamer count, many of whom (such as Tyler “Ninja” Blevins” and Turner “Tfue” Tenney) are among the most-watched personalities on the platform. The game’s esports scene is also growing steadily, and unlike traditional esports tournaments, in battle royale games, each competitor broadcasts their matches simultaneously to an engrossed audience.

With all this in mind, The International, Dota 2’s biggest annual esports tournament, generated enough interest on Twitch alone to help the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) title overtake Fortnite. As we laid out in our TI8 viewership recap, the official Twitch channels for the competition accrued 41.7M total hours watched during the course of the event, with roughly 30.0M coming just from last week’s main event—that’s 88.5% of all Dota 2 viewership on Twitch last week.

The maximum concurrent viewership (max CCV) for Dota 2 last week reached 787.3K, which while high, is still somewhat far from League of Legends during last year’s World Championship finals (1.1M), or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive during the finals of the ELEAGUE Major: Boston (1.3M).

Bear in mind, that every match of the TI8 is available to watch in Dota 2’s own in-game spectator mode, known as DotaTV. Available with the same multi-language commentary as the stream broadcast, DotaTV offers a lot of additional options for viewers: including a free camera mode, multiple perspectives of the battlefield and players, and the ability to rewind freely. Valve does not publish viewer metrics for this option, so we don’t actually know how many prefer to watch in-game vs. a streaming platform—which in this case also includes the newly released Steam TV.

World of Warcraft Still High on Expansion Hype



This week, Blizzard Entertainment announced that Battle for Azeroth was the fastest ever selling expansion for World of Warcraft (WoW). 3.4M in day-one sales globally is nothing short of commendable for a 17 year old game, and the effects continue to be felt on Twitch. While total hours watched for WoW dropped by 21.5% from last week, the game retains an average concurrent viewership of 72.0K, just under half that of Fortnite.

WoW will likely slip further next week, as more of its new content is uncovered, as there becomes less and less for the game’s streamer base to showcase. Nevertheless, the takeaway from last week’s Twitch content is that anyone calling either WoW or Dota 2 a “dead game” couldn’t be more wrong.