Esports became a trend quite recently — a few years ago, when tournament’s prize pools reached enormous numbers and huge sponsors came to the industry with multimillion-dollar contracts.

The vast majority of esports fans learned about competitive gaming just recently, so only a few of them remember the esports events of the past decade. WESG 2017 brings back many memories. Ten years ago esports was more like the Olympics — there were a lot of teams and tournaments based on nationality. In the same time one championship could host a lot of tournaments based on different disciplines at once.

WESG is the right step to bring esports closer to real sport. If the Olympic Committee recognizes esports, it will allow esports to make a huge leap forward to attract new fans and investors. However WESG had a lot of technical issues which spoiled the impressions of the tournament.

The most popular WESG tournament was a CS:GO competition. It was a surprising fact since Counter Strike is quite unpopular in the Middle Kingdom while WESG was hold in China. The match between Team Russia and Team AGO from Poland was the most favored in WESG 2017 if we count the Chinese viewers. In the same time without the Chinese fans statistics is much more logical — the final is the most popular, while the second place was took by match between Team Russia and Space Soldiers from Turkey. If Team Russia would go to the finals the results could be completely different due to a huge esports audience from CIS countries.

Starcraft 2 is not so popular as it was 10 years ago, but it still has a huge amount of fans throughout the world, most of all — from China. Best SC2 players from all regions played in WESG 2017, but the Korean player as always won. The most popular match appeared to be a match for the third place due to Serral from Finland took part in it. With the Chinese fans the most popular match was a semifinal between Serral and future champion Maru from the Korea.

DotA has deep roots in China, but the Chinese teams couldn’t achieve goods results in WESG second year in a row. It influenced the audience activity. The final of WESG 2017 collected a lot of Chinese fans. Match between Rock.Y from China and the Brazilian paiN Gaming also gathered a lot of viewers.

Hearthstone WESG 2017 appeared to be the most unpopular among all tournaments. It is not strange — almost all players are unknown. Posesi is quite popular player from Japan, so all matches with him gathered a relatively huge audience.