‘Fortnite’ World Cup in Super Bowl league

TWO WEEKS ago, Epic Games held its first World Cup, a three-day video game competition extravaganza that had at one point 2.3 million viewers from around the globe.

Now we’re getting a closer look at the demographics of those viewers, providing insight into whether the video-game industry’s biggest hit has become a mainstream cultural phenomenon. Lots of people love to play

a winner-kill-all shooter game, but it’s harder to tell how many people want to watch them do it.

StreamMetrics, a company that provides in-depth audience measurement for esports competitions, has new numbers that show the event’s US audience was older and more female than might be expected.

It also was as big a draw as traditional sport. The five-hour final broadcast averaged 90 000 viewers per minute in the US, StreamMetrics found. That’s roughly equivalent to the local TV audience for a regular-season San Francisco Giants game.

In other words, it wasn’t the Super Bowl – but it was a respectable showing, said Dan Nemo, co-founder of StreamMetrics.

“The event was a huge success,” he said. “There were questions surrounding 18 months ago, asking if they could attract the audiences and make it enjoyable for people to watch. Now, they’ve evolved into a premier esport.”

Esports, video-game competitions played in front of spectators, is a male-dominated field but StreamMetrics found that the World Cup had a more balanced audience in both age and gender than many such events.

Women and girls accounted for 43% of viewers. That’s a big jump from the 23% that StreamMetrics saw in June for other competitions.

And 44% of viewers were over the age of 35, up from less than a third in previous events. Nemo credits both surges to the hype that surrounded the event.

StreamMetrics, founded this year, is backed by the venture arm of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, the parent company of the Philadelphia 76ers, New Jersey Devils and Newark’s Prudential Centre. The group also owns the esports franchise Team Dignitas.

The company says it measure viewers based on a full minute of duration watched, in line with traditional TV measurements. Its numbers could add clarity to an industry that’s often mischaracterised.

For example, after a League of Legends championship event claimed 99.6 million unique viewers last year, many media outlets reported that it was nearly as popular as the Super Bowl. But the Super Bowl ratings are US-only, and calculated on an average; esports are generally global. |