Esports World Cup: keeping viewers engaged during long LAN events

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We are wrapping up the review of the monumental Esports World Cup 2024, which concluded just over a week ago. EWC is one of the few LAN tournaments in modern esports history to last over a month and a half, bringing together a wide variety of players and viewers, from fans of globally popular MOBA titles to enthusiasts of niche games like racing.

It's no secret that the longer a LAN event lasts, the harder it is for it to maintain high audience numbers over time. And if we’re talking about a multi-title competition, where the audience sizes for each game can vary drastically — even by tens of times — it’s an even greater challenge. So how did the Esports World Cup handle this? Let’s take a look at the tournament’s weekly stats and try to understand how successfully the event managed to keep fans entertained throughout the entire festival.

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As we mentioned in our previous articles, EWC viewers were most active during the first three weeks of the event, after which the numbers dropped significantly. The early days of the tournament featured competitions for the most globally popular esports titles, including League of Legends, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Counter-Strike, and Dota 2. These four games were the most watched by audiences based on last year's statistics. In other words, there is a concentration of popular games in the opening days and a lack of such games in the subsequent weeks of the festival.

As shown in the graph above, the gap between the first three weeks and the following ones is striking — with the overall numbers for the eighth and final week being almost ten times lower than the total viewership of the opening week. Of course, the varying popularity of games is the most significant factor behind this drastic drop in metrics from the start to the end of the event, but it’s not the only one. Other contributing factors include:

• Many of the games featured in weeks 4-8, such as Overwatch, Apex Legends, Fortnite, and others, typically attract significant viewership throughout the year on the official game channels. However, since the developers and publishers weren’t involved with EWC, there were no broadcasts on these official platforms. At the same time, EWC's main channels are still in the process of building their follower base and aren't yet the go-to content source for fans of many of the games showcased in these later weeks. While attracting an audience for these titles at future EWC events should become easier, it was difficult to expect that right away from a debut tournament.

• Another important factor applies to Battle Royale games at EWC. Due to the nature of the genre and the presence of many popular livestreamers as participants, POV streams from event players could have significantly boosted viewership for games like Apex Legends and Fortnite.

Maintaining consistent viewership throughout the event and keeping audience engagement high until the end is crucial, especially for the Esports World Cup, which is rich in content beyond just the tournaments. The EWC featured a variety of activities, including opening and closing ceremonies, show matches with gaming/sports stars and other celebrities. Moreover, the Esports Awards, which honored the standout figures in esports for 2024, followed right after the EWC.

Given that the final week of the EWC was the least successful in terms of viewership, it’s fair to say that several key moments (such as the closing ceremony and the following ESA) missed out on some viewers. For future events in the series, this issue can be addressed relatively easily, by avoiding the concentration of top games at the start of the event and scheduling one top game for each stage of the global competition.