Stormgate’s first-ever esports event was welcomed by 10,000 concurrent viewers
Stormgate, an upcoming RTS game, held its first-ever esports tournament to a warm reception of over 10,000 Peak Viewers. Since the closed beta began in December, last year, the hype and excitement for Stormgate only continues to build.
The real-time strategy game is developed by Frost Giant Studios, a relatively new studio founded by two ex-Blizzard Entertainment employees. Tim Morten and Tim Campbell, previously Production Director and Senior Lead Designer at Blizzard, respectively, founded the studio with high hopes in 2020. They wanted to build a new more accessible real-time strategy game, both having worked previously on StarCraft II and WarCraft III.
After years of hard work and funding through Kickstarter campaigns and seed investments, Frost Giant Studios has gotten Stormgate ready for the first stages of its esports competition and general play. The $10,000 EGC Stormgate Open was the game's first esports tournament, and thousands of fans on Twitch watched 512 players compete for victory.
EGC Stormgate Open Viewership Statistics
The $10,000 EGC Stormgate Open was live for over 36 hours as the 512 competitors were slowly whittled down. Although the key philosophy of Stormgate is for the game to be more accessible and free to entry, the developers also have a keen focus on developing an interesting and fair competitive title for advanced players.
The final match of the event saw the Spaniard VortiX face off against the South Korean player PartinG. As you would expect from a new esports discipline, the dominant players of the event had previous esports experience in similar titles. VortiX was previously a WarCraft III, Starcraft II, and Age of Empires IV esports player; PartinG was a StarCraft II world champion over a decade ago and is generally an extremely experienced RTS player. The grand final between these two RTS titans received 10.2K Peak Viewers.
In total the event received 165.3K Hours Watched, which mainly came from the EGCTV official Twitch channel. At the beginning of February, Stormgate partnered with Steam to open their closed beta to the public for a limited time. On Twitch, Stormgate has generated hundreds of thousands of hours of watch time through various RTS fans checking out the title, but the official EGCTV channel remains the most-watched Stormgate channel of February, so far.
Using the Streams Charts games database, we can track how Stormgate has performed on Twitch overall. December saw the game reach its peak concurrent viewership, 56K Peak Viewers, for the game’s closed beta release. However, since opening their beta in collaboration with Steam, watch time has increased drastically.
As of today, February 22, Stormgate has generated 796K Hours Watched on Twitch. So far, this is the game’s most-watched month ever. If this viewership continues for the rest of the month, we can estimate that Stormgate will receive 1M HW on Twitch in February alone. On top of the exciting esports potential Stormgate brings to the RTS scene, it may be one of Twitch’s most popular RTS games when it finally releases this year.
Stormgate may be the up-and-coming title to rejuvenate the RTS esports scene, which is largely dominated by titles released well over a decade ago. Esports Charts will continue to track the esports events for Stormgate and their viewership statistics, and fans can navigate to Streams Charts to analyse the game’s viewership statistics in live streaming overall.
