The biggest live eSports events in history

1. #5 League of Legends World Championship 2015
2. #4 CFS World Championship 2017
3. #3 League of Legends World Championship 2016
4. #2 Intel Extreme Masters Katowice 2017
5. #1 LoL Mid-Season Invitational 2018
6. More on the growth of the world of eSports
7. The comparison with the Super Bowl
8. The future of eSports venues

The world of eSports has grown alongside the internet, evolving with advances in console and computer technology. Competitions once confined to a games room now take centre stage in major arenas, and streaming lets millions of fans watch their favourite teams play from anywhere in the world.

Little more than a decade ago there were serious doubts that competitive video games could reach the level of a traditional sporting event like the Super Bowl. But when a mere mid-season Invitational came within 30 million viewers of the Super Bowl, those doubts began to fade.

And when a single eSports event filled a stadium holding 173,000 people — against the 75,000 at the Super Bowl 2019 venue — every last doubt disappeared.

Here are the 5 biggest events in the history of eSports.

Date: 01/10/15 - 31/10/15
Location: Paris, London, Brussels and Berlin
Live attendance: 43,000
Online viewers: 36,000,000
Prize pool: $2,130,000

This event was watched by 36 million unique viewers over a total of 386 million viewing hours, breaking audience records at the time.

Riot Games held its fifth World Championship across four cities: 'Le Dock Pullman' in Paris, 'SSE Arena Wembley' in London, the 'Brussels Expo' and the 'Mercedes-Benz Arena' in Berlin. Sixteen teams competed on League of Legends Patch 5.18.

The event racked up 550,000 views on Twitch, 240,000 on YouTube and 30,000 on the New Viewers Stream. The final drew 14 million viewers to watch SK Telecom T1 take the win, with MaRin as most valuable player.

Date: 30/11/17 - 03/12/17
Venue: Xi'an, China
Online viewers: 37,000,000
Prize money: $850,000

This Crossfire tournament (SmileGate's first-person shooter) drew 37 million unique viewers over 6,537,068 viewing hours, mostly a Chinese audience.

Twelve teams competed at the Xi'an Gymnasium for the $850,000 prize. Chinese team Super Valiant Gaming took the win, with a peak of 914,182 views on Chinese platforms against just 323 on English-language platforms.

Date: 29/09/16 - 29/10/16
Location: San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles
Live attendance: 47,268
Online viewers: 43,000,000
Prize pool: $5,070,000

A year after #5 on this list, Riot Games broke records again with 43 million unique viewers and 370 million total hours watched.

The tournament toured the United States across four landmark venues: the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, the Chicago Theatre, Madison Square Garden and the Staples Center. SK Telecom T1 took gold once more, with a peak audience of 28,263,260 viewers.

Date: 25-26/02/17 and 03-05/03/17
Venue: Katowice, Poland
Live attendance: 173,000
Online viewers: 46,000,000
Prize: $250,000

Sponsored by Intel, this event brought three games together in a single championship: CS:GO, League of Legends and StarCraft II. It drew 46 million unique viewers and 19,744,073 viewing hours.

At the Spodek Arena, packed with 173,000 spectators, twelve teams competed for a surprisingly modest $250,000 prize. There were three different champions: Astralis in CS:GO, Flash Wolves in League of Legends and Jun "TY" Tae Yang in StarCraft II.

Date: 03/05/18 - 20/05/18
Location: Adlershof (Germany) and Paris (France)
Live attendance: more than 7,000
Online viewers: 60,000,000
Prize: $1,370,520

The biggest eSports event in history was not even a championship: it was an Invitational. With 60 million unique viewers, it generated 2,077,897,606 total viewing hours — more than two billion hours.

Fourteen teams competed on League of Legends version 8.8, with peaks of 448,451 viewers on Twitch and an average concurrent audience of 24,590,504. RNG took first place, although the $1,370,520 prize was modest for an event of that size.

Video game sales revenue in the United States:

• 2014: $41,000,000,000
• 2015: $61,000,000,000
• 2016: $99,600,000,000
• 2017: $108,900,000,000
• 2018: $135,000,000,000

In 2018, Major League Baseball (MLB) led professional sports leagues by revenue with $10,300,000,000. That same year, video game revenues came in around $120,000,000,000 higher than the MLB's.

One key reason for this growth is that video games are a natural component of technological innovation: easily marketable products, attractive to sponsors because of their popularity with younger generations.

In 2019, the Super Bowl drew some 98,200,000 unique viewers and filled Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium with 75,000 people.

A year earlier, the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational drew roughly 60,000,000 unique viewers, even though Le Zénith (the French venue) only held 6,293 people live.

The comparison shows how firmly established traditional sport remains: eSports are looking to share that space, not displace it. Commercially there is a clear parallel: just as the Super Bowl is famous for its adverts and its win-win-win model, eSports are building an increasingly solid advertising ecosystem of their own.

To keep growing, eSports need physical space. UCI has already built an arena on its campus for its eSports team, a forward-looking move that other universities will probably follow.

Las Vegas, for its part, has committed to building its own high-end eSports arena, folded into its entertainment and betting ecosystem. Sports betting is a well-established market because of its universality, and eSports will not be very different in that respect.

As the sector's popularity grows, so does its value: year-on-year rises in audience, sponsorship and revenue point to a very promising future for competitive gaming.

Related products: Video Games for Events Welcome to Las Vegas