Age of Empires II: Most popular tournaments, players, and overall state of the discipline 20 years after release

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Age of Empires II is an RTS game for PC from Microsoft. The original version of the game was released in 1999, and 20 years later the developers have provided fans of the Definitive Edition with new textures, campaigns, and other tweaks.

The game features one of the most enduring fanbases and, despite being 20 years old, still attracts viewers on Twitch and even made it to the platform's top 100 categories in 2020. In addition to the community broadcasts, professional competitions are held in the discipline. Esports Charts decided to take a look at the discipline’s performance, audience, and streamers.

Age of Empires II esports results

We reviewed the results of the Age of Empires II esports scene. It can be seen that in 2019 the results were quite mediocre, not even reaching 1M Hours Watched. Q4 2019 featured no major esports tournaments at all due to the launch of the Definitive Edition. At the same time, there has been a sharp increase in performance from 2020 onward.

Q1 2020 generated 2.5M Hours Watched, with the Hidden Cup 3 from T90Official being responsible for half of them. In Q2 and Q3, the results began to decline, but in Q4 2020 the discipline showed growth once more – thanks to the show matches between popular players, as well as to Red Bull Wololo III. In Q1 2021, the discipline reached its peak thanks to Hidden Cup 4, which featured many legends from the Age of Empires gaming scene.

Right now the indicators have decreased once again, but soon enough the dynamics shall take a positive turn, given the start of Red Bull Wololo V on September 13th.

The English-language channels were where the Age of Empires II esports scene was at its most watched (77% of total Hours Watched) followed by the Spanish-language broadcasts (15%). Platform-wise, viewers seem to prefer Twitch the most, with 88% of total Hours Watched amassed starting from 2019 and till Q2 2021.

In case you’ve noticed that some Age of Empires II tournaments are missing on Esports Charts, let us know at escharts.com/submit and we will definitely add them.

Most popular Age of Empires II tournaments by Peak Viewers

Hidden Cup 4, which started on March 18th, became the most popular tournament in terms of the peak viewers: 76K. In addition to the Hidden Cup tournaments, the first Red Bull Wololo (56K viewers) and a show match from ZeratoR also got into the top.

On a side note, the tournaments of the Wololo series are held with the support of Red Bull for the fifth season already and feature sizable prize pools. The main stage of Red Bull Wololo V will start on September 13th.

Most popular players of Age of Empires II by Hours Watched

Hamzah "Hera" El-Baher became the most popular Age of Empires II player for the period from 2019 till Q2 2021, collecting 2.4M Hours Watched on the events broadcasts with his participation. Following him is the Oryan "TheViper" Larsen with 2.3M Hours Watched. The third spot went to Kai "Liereyy" Kallinger with 1.5M Hours Watched.

Age of Empires II streaming overview

To analyze the results of Age of Empires II, we derived statistics for both the base game (1999) and the Definitive Edition (2019) and combined the indicators.

We reviewed the streaming results of Age of Empires from 2019 (Definitive Edition release) till Q2 2021. Before the release of the Definitive Edition, the game amassed 1.4M Hours Watched on average per quarter, but with the release of the updated version (Q4 2019), there was a sharp increase in indicators, worth 505% compared to Q3 2019.

The Definitive Edition has greatly improved the category's performance. Q3 2020 has brought us the mark of 154K Peak Viewers, which was achieved thanks to the French marathon ZLAN 2020 from the streamer ZeratoR, where the participants of the event also played Age of Empires II.

Even after the marathon, the game’s Hours Watched did not decline much –in fact, the indicator started growing in 2021, to the point of reaching the best result in three years: in Q1 2021, the game reached 11.2M Hours Watched on Twitch.

Most popular Age of Empires II streamers

The streamer known as T90Official directly contributed to the growth of performance of Age of Empires II. Tristan Berry is a professional AoE player, but aside of being a proficient gamer, he acts as a commentator (and even organizer) of tournaments. Starting from 2019 and till Q2 2021, Tristan generated 10.8M Hours Watched. When it comes to events, T90 is hosting the Hidden Cup, where fans don’t know the player identities behind each character until the very end of the event.

The second and third spots in terms of Hours Watched are also occupied by professional AoE players: TheViper, who was originally an AoE streamer on the closed Mixer platform (3.7M), and Hera (3.1M).

We’ve also taken a look at the top based on Peak Viewers – and there, the first spot is taken by the French streamer ZeratoR because of the ZLAN 2020 marathon: 149K viewers. The second spot is taken by the streamer LIRIK with 81K viewers. The third spot is taken by T90Official, given that he hosted the Hidden Cup tournament (64.6K viewers). The fourth spot belongs to the Portuguese-speaking streamer Gaules (35K viewers).

When it comes to audience, the English, Spanish and French streams were watched by 67%, 10%, and 6% of viewers, respectively.

The indicators of Age of Empires are certainly not comparable to those of the classic disciplines – but it should be understood that this game is already 20 years old, yet still can be found in Twitch’s top 100 categories. It is rather surprising that the category’s performance keeps on improving purely based on content, without following the example of other organizers in terms of attracting the platform’s top streamers for the show matches. All factors considered, the growth dynamics of Age of Empires II is quite positive, albeit directly dependant on the discipline’s esports scene – given that tournaments (such as the Hidden Cup) generate half of the platform's quarterly figures.

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