The 2021 "League of Legends" World Championship proved to be the year's most popular eSports event in terms of viewership, which proved that competitive gaming didn't slow down much in 2021.
“League of Legend” is now on Epic Games Store. Meanwhile, “LoL’s” joins “Fortnite” as part of their crossover event.
According to DotESports, the competition's stream managed to net peak viewership numbers of 4,018,728 during the grand finals, which pit DAMWON KIA against Edward Gaming.
It also averaged almost 1.3 million viewers, with total watch hours topping 174 million, which solidly puts it at the top spot.
Edward Gaming proved victorious against DAMWON, 3-2, in a nail-biting best-of-5 series. This win was considered an upset against the heavily favored South Korean team, reports The Washington Post.
For the uninitiated, South Korean teams have a long history of dominating "League of Legends."
Another highly watched event was Season 2 of "Call of Duty: Mobile" Masters China, which reportedly had 1.2 million viewers. It also had a peak viewership of 1.98 million viewers on the livestream platform Huya, which is one of the biggest of its kind in China.
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Completing the list is the PGL Stockholm "CS:GO" Major and the "Free Fire" World Series 2021, held in Sweden and Singapore, respectively.
PGL Stockholm tallied peak viewership numbers of around 2.75 million, which doubled what previous record-holder ELEAGUE Major 2017. As for the "Free Fire" 2021 World Series, that event averaged over 2 million viewers for a total of nine hours, with peak viewership reaching over 5.4 million.
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Not only did Edward Gaming bag bragging rights at this year's edition of the LoL Worlds, but they also cashed in one of the biggest prize pools in recent eSports history.
The total prize pool for the 2021 Worlds is a massive $2,225,000. But while this already sounds like an impressive amount of money, you'd be surprised at just how big cash prizes can get for other tournaments.
As per DotESports, the single biggest eSports prize pool for this year was courtesy of "DOTA 2" TI (The International) 10, which gave away an insane $40,018,195.
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This dwarfs almost anything else that comes after it. The second placer, which is the "PUBG" Global Invitational.S 2021, had $7,056,789 up for grabs-a paltry sum relative to the recent "DOTA 2" TI's prize pool.
eSports Is Booming Despite COVID
It seems like the pandemic did almost nothing to slow down the growth of competitive gaming this year, which is very evident in all those viewership numbers and prize pools.
This is likely due to the mostly online nature of eSports as a whole. While crowd participation is a key element of the tournament experience in eSports, the banning of in-person competitions still played out well for pro gaming with organizers constantly finding ways to keep their tournaments going, according to eSportsInsider.
It's bad out there with COVID, but competitive gaming is still experiencing a renaissance despite the odds.
Participants sit at a computer monitor to play a video game at the 2019 DreamHack video gaming festival on February 15, 2019 in Leipzig, Germany. The three-day event brings together gaming enthusiasts, mainly from German-speaking countries, for events including eSports tournaments, cosplay contests and a LAN party with 1,500 participants.
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Written by RJ Pierce
