Each country across the globe has its favourite esports discipline: North America is the home of Call of Duty esports, Indonesia is the premiere location for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and South Korea is the driving force behind League of Legends viewership. Utilising the comprehensive Esports Charts database, we have collated some of the most popular esports country-by-country, focusing on Eastern Europe as a case study.
Deciding which esports discipline is objectively the most popular within a single country is not so simple. For some countries, we can utilise the language viewership statistics of their official language to track data, but this cannot be applied to countries without much following in their official language, or countries that share an overlap with official languages. For example, tracking the most popular discipline by language statistics for Portugual would be impossible, as both Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are tracked together in Twitch statistics.
Therefore, we created a secondary method to track the popularity of esports disciplines when language statistics are not applicable. Rather than focusing on viewership statistics, we tracked the total esports events held in every country, and by finding the esports discipline with the most total tournaments held, we can find the country’s most popular esports discipline.
To reflect the modern state of esports as accurately as possible, all data considered in this article spans the entire year of 2023.
Most Popular Esports of Eastern Europe
At first glance what is immediately clear is the domination of Counter-Strike in Eastern Europe. Since the early days of Counter-Strike, the game has been hugely popular across the world, but especially in Eastern Europe and CIS regions. In Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Serbia Counter-Strike was the most popular esports discipline by language watch time.
Moving north towards the Baltics, Counter-Strike remains the most popular discipline, but this was calculated with our secondary metric. Estonian, Lithuanian, and Latvian do not generate enough viewership in their official languages to be considered for our primary metric, however, these countries all hosted various Counter-Strike tournaments throughout 2023.
MOBA esports are more popular than shooters in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Both the Czech Republic and Slovakia are represented in League of Legends by the Hitpoint Masters series, a tier-2 regional league for both countries. However, the league leans heavily towards the Czech Republic, and very few Slovakian players are represented. This may be part of the reason why Slovakian-speaking viewers preferred Dota 2 over League of Legends in 2023.
Judging the audience size for esports disciplines within countries, Romania’s Counter-Strike audience is roughly similar in size to the Czech audience for League of Legends and Serbia’s Counter-Strike audience. However, all of these countries are dwarfed by Poland and Ukraine. Poland and Ukraine’s Counter-Strike audiences are some of the largest in Europe, and these countries’ Counter-Strike fans generated roughly four times more viewership than the Czech Republic’s League of Legends audience.
Esports in Slovenia and Croatia are not as dominant as in other Eastern European countries with similar populations such as Slovakia and Serbia. Viewership statistics for these countries were not sufficient, and when turning towards tournaments held as a metric instead, both countries only hosted a couple of events. The Hall of Game Championship Fortnite event was the most-watched event in Croatia, and the League of Legends tournament the Slovenian National Championship was the other country’s most-watched event.
Analysing Ukraine, Poland, and the Czech Republic more closely, a clear discrepancy is seen in Ukraine’s statistics. Although when calculated by Ukrainian-language viewership statistics Counter-Strike is the most popular esports discipline, far more Dota 2 events were hosted in Ukraine than Counter-Strike tournaments. Combining offline LAN events and regional online tournaments, Ukraine hosted 74 esports events in 2023.
The ESportsBattle - Autumn Cup 6 was the most-watched tournament held in Ukraine with 124.5K Hours Watched. Ukraine was the most prolific esports location in Eastern Europe throughout 2023, hosting 31 Dota 2 tournaments, almost half of all tournaments hosted. ESportsBattle was responsible for more than 20 of these events, generating 1.2M Hours Watched in total and offering over $120K in prize pools.
ESportsBattle also hosted some Counter-Strike events, but the Dota 2 events received considerably more attention. Despite hosting so many of Ukraine’s events, the tournament organiser’s tournaments were all exclusively broadcast in Russian, instead of Ukrainian. Dota 2 is clearly a fan-favourite for the region, so Counter-Strike’s preference among viewers in Ukraine is partly caused by NAVI and s1mple’s popularity and success.
S1mple, often considered Counter-Strike’s best player of all time, is a Ukranian celebrity within the discipline. He has spent more than 7 years playing under the Natus Vincere banner, a Ukrainian esports organisation, but towards the end of 2023 he took a step back from competing concurrently with Counter-Strike 2’s release. If s1mple does eventually retire or step back from esports competitions entirely, we may see Dota 2 leapfrog ahead of Counter-Strike in terms of popularity within Ukraine.
One key reason for preferring language watch time as a metric instead of watch time of tournaments hosted in the country is the effect of international viewership. Poland’s most popular Counter-Strike tournament of 2023 was IEM Katowice 2023, but Polish fans were not the driving force behind the event’s viewership.
The tournament was responsible for 95% of all watch time generated by Counter-Strike events in Poland, but only 2.3% of this event’s watch time was generated by Polish-language live streams. Nevertheless, Poland is indeed a Counter-Strike country; including IEM Katowice 2023, 18 Counter-Strike tournaments were held in the country during 2023.
As esports has grown, the fanbases and audiences involved continue to mimic those of traditional sports. Fans feverishly support their national team and viewership rises and falls among languages as fans wait for their compatriots to take the stage. National support for esports is at an all-time high, and it will only continue to grow as more and more fans are exposed to the esports scene.
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