Fortnite’s esports channel makes its first appearance in our top ten, while the Overwatch League playoffs, ELEAGUE Premier, and FACEIT Minors go head-to-head for FPS audience attention.

Every week, TEO releases a list of the top 10 Twitch esports channels, ranked by total number of hours watched, from Monday through Sunday, with data compiled using TEO Audience Insights.

Overwatch



While League of Legends pulled in its standard viewership numbers for the EU LCS and NA LCS—roughly 100K fewer total hours watched than last week—Blizzard’s top esports competition isn’t exactly living up to expectations. The Overwatch League (OWL) playoffs, despite offering a significant upset with the elimination of the New York Excelsior , drew in 146.1K viewership at its peak. For comparison, the highest maximum concurrent viewership for Stage 4 of the regular season (not counting the Stage finals) was 140.9K.

Overwatch Twitch viewership, by max CCV, from May 1 to July 23



This isn’t to say the viewership was poor; as our graphic shows, this was still the second-most watched esports channel of the week, and its max CCV was third of any channel on Twitch. It’s more a case that the semifinals of a franchised esports league failed to reach a significantly higher viewership than its regular season games, and determining why is complex. Perhaps the multi-match format proved too taxing for viewers to watch over a long stretch of time, or maybe the absence of teams like the Houston Outlaws or the Dallas Fuel (the two OWL teams with the highest social media followers), resulted in less interest from otherwise weekly viewers.

We will be analyzing the OWL’s season viewership as a whole later this week in preparation for the grand finals this weekend.

Fortnite



Even though Epic Games is still facing criticism over the spectator experience of its first official Fortnite offerings, the Summer Skirmish series is already a weekly highlight of Twitch. The first week of the competition series only racked up 292.3K total hours watched, but has increased roughly 344.7% to 1.3M with last week’s $500K prize pool solo tournament. At 215.6K, the competition also had the highest max CCV of any esports channel last week, and the second overall next to Tyler “Ninja” Blevins’ 226.8K.

#FridayFortnite is canceled for tomorrow.@EpicGames is running their own event & told everyone last min. Yesterday they invited 5 of my players so I was still doing FF now they invited all. They capped FF at $20k & are doing events for $500k. I’m not holding the players back. — KEEM ? (@KEEMSTAR) July 20, 2018

The clearest contributor to this increase is a shift of broadcast day. Daniel ‘KEEMSTAR’ Keem, who had been running a popular celebrity tournament on Fridays, canceled last week’s event, after Epic scheduled their first party event for the same time. The higher prize pool of Epic’s event drew away the Friday Fortnite’s biggest streamers, leaving Epic with something akin to a prime-time slot on Twitch—even if the general public still feel their tournament series needs major improvement.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive



If the bright, kinetic action of Overwatch wasn’t to your taste, there were two highlights in the CS:GO calendar to enjoy last week.

The ELEAGUE Premier was the first CS:GO competition for Turner and IMG’s esports series since the Boston Major earlier this year (which currently holds the record for most concurrent viewers of a Twitch stream, at 1.1M). The Premier looks like it also has the same potential to captivate audiences, accruing an ironic 1.1M in its first two days, and peaking at 124.4K max CCV.

The FACEIT Minors, the first ever Valve-sanctioned qualifiers to be held by the esports production company, aren’t high-stakes enough to draw in a massive number of viewers at once. Furthermore, while ELEAGUE is a property exclusively signed to Twitch, FACEIT have allowed these games to go out on multiple platforms. Nevertheless, we’re still looking at 1.2M total hours watched by the end of last week, which is impressive considering the teams playing weren’t always the most well-known in Counter-Strike.

The data in this article was collected from TEO Audience Insights. You can learn more about the platform and discover more streaming stats yourself by clicking here.