There’s no denying the fact that esports is growing at an incredible rate and that the viewing figures are getting close to some of the big events taking place in traditional sports. For example, PUBG Mobile Global Championship Season 0 had 3.8 million viewers at its peak.
There has been a lot of speculation regarding whether or not esports will take over from traditional sports, they’re not really in direct competition. However, it is useful to compare the two in terms of how mainstream esports has become. This shift has happened in a relatively short space of time and has mainly bypassed the television networks showing sports like football and basketball. So how do people tend to watch esports?
Gambling and esports – How to stream
Sports and gambling have always gone hand-in-hand, but the kind of modern gamblers that tend to watch esports also tend to use modern gambling platforms including cryptocurrency options. Thunderpick focuses on Esports crypto betting and allows gamblers to deposit and withdraw in crypto. This provides one of the fastest and most efficient ways of moving money around and also protects the anonymity of gamblers.
A study by YouGov in the UK found that one in five of consumers aged 18-24 in the US, UK, Australia, India, Germany, and Canada are interested in gambling on esports. The number is up as high as 22% among those 25-34 and then gets lower in older age groups. Around 94% of cryptocurrency users are in the range of 18-40, so you can see that there is a lot of crossover between crypto users and esports gamblers. Casinos have adapted to this by providing esports crypto betting but also offering the chance to stream the biggest events.
A quick look at top crypto casinos and other betting brands will show that it is easy to stream directly on their sites. Some of the streaming options include watching CSGO, DOTA, and video game versions of soccer and basketball.
While sports like soccer and football are often tied into long, lucrative television deals that prevent them from streaming, esports companies usually aren’t. This means they can offer streaming rights to gambling companies as well as broadcast the events on a variety of other platforms as we explore below.
Twitch
It is around 10 years since Twitch took the world by storm and became one of the most-viewed sites for gaming. Amazon bought the site for $970 million back in 2014 when it had quickly shot to prominence, and today it is still one of the top options for live streaming.
League of Legends World Championship in 2022 is, according to most sources, the most-viewed event in the history of esports, and many people tuned in to watch it via Twitch. Though, like a lot of the events out there, there were multiple ways to tune in. It was available on the Riot Games Twitch channel, the League of Legends YouTube channel, and the League of Legends’ own site.
Twitch is great for big events, but it is also an option for a lot of the smaller events that don’t always get so much coverage. People tend to follow their favorite gamers on the site which means even if they are just logging in to play a quick game, they often get many thousands of people tuning in to watch the stream. It is also popular for some non-gaming streams such as music.
YouTube
YouTube tried to directly rival Twitch for the same kind of audience when it launched YouTube Gaming, but this was short-lived and doesn’t exist in the same format anymore. What does still exist is YouTube Gaming Live, and a lot of gaming events are streamed via this section of the site. There are on average over 500,000 concurrent viewers on YouTube Gaming Live streams at any one time.
People also know that they can find content from their favorite esports teams on the site, even if it is not live. For instance, LoL Esports has around 3.5 million subscribers, and they share clips of their events as well as other exclusive content. YouTube continues to be a hub for esports even if it is not the platform used most for live streaming.
Conclusion
There are some other options out there for streaming, and users often need to do a little bit of searching around to see where the best coverage will be. Other platforms such as Steam TV and Facebook Games have grown, but they are currently nowhere near the levels we see on Twitch and YouTube.
In the future, pretty much everyone expects that esports will continue to grow, which will mean even more streaming options. Its accessibility for streaming and for gambling on esports continue to be reasons for the popularity of esports tournaments and events.
Photo credit: The feature image is symbolic and has been done by Stem List.
