2020 was an unusual year for everyone. Yet for the gaming and esports industry, the year was anything but bad. A total of 17 billion watching hours were recorded on twitch.tv in 2020. That’s over 6 billion hours more than in 2019. To put that in perspective: From 2018 to 2019, the total number of watching hours on twitch.tv increased only by 1.7 billion (source: sullygnome). The growth of esports in 2020 was expected by experts, but the impact of the unusual circumstances of 2020 can hardly be denied with numbers being as high as presented.
Despite the absence of many offline tournaments and events, Esports titles also held up very well in 2020. In the following table, we show the 15 most-watched Esports titles and their development in recent years.
Esports | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 |
|---|---|---|---|
Source: sullygnome.com | |||
1. League of Legends | 1,473,287,030 hours | 1,118,435,546 hours | 985,380,685 hours |
2. Fortnite | 982,460,964 hours | 1,054,128,758 hours
| 1,358,048,914 hours |
3. Valorant | 779,683,236 hours | – | – |
4. Call of Duty: Warzone | 753,027,133 hours | – | – |
5. CSGO | 665,427,863 hours | 457,874,735 hours | 401,775,324 hours |
6. Dota 2 | 460,653,325 hours | 503,022,570 hours | 472,414,819 hours |
7. Escape from Tarkov | 345,090,985 hours | 82,378,834 hours | 46,901,551 hours |
8. FIFA | 300,052,408 hours | 165.295.532 hours | 105.390.374 hours |
9. Apex Legends | 290,759,569 hours | 347,320,949 hours | – |
10. Hearthstone | 260,756,384 hours
| 250,216,025 hours | 357,611,445 hours |
11. Overwatch | 159,246,410 hours | 284,088,177 hours | 301,791,389 hours |
12. PUBG | 146,998,908 hours | 248,315,861 hours | 454,157,076 hours |
13. Rainbow Six Siege | 138,479,467 hours | 126,971,484 hours | 115,497,689 hours
|
14. Rocket League | 121,133,753 hours | 57,694,857 hours | 49,155,757 hours |
15. Destiny 2 | 94,762,241 hours | 71,157,921 hours | 70,184,660 hours |
