SWC2021: Is Summoners War losing popularity?

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Despite major tournaments in mobile MMOs being quite a rarity, Summoners War esports managed to maintain its popularity for years and its latest World Finals event is proof of that. 

The $130,000 competition has become one of the discipline’s best-performing events, with viewership results reaching numbers comparable with some of the biggest esports leagues. That said, the discipline no longer seems to be in its prime. 

In this article, Esport Charts looks at the viewership performance of Summoners War World Arena Championship 2021 World Finals, compares it with previous editions and analyses the results to determine how is the discipline doing in terms of popularity. 

Summoners War introduction

First released in 2014 by South Korean game developer Com2uS, Summoners Wars is a mobile turn-based strategy MMO set in a fantasy universe inhabited by various kinds of monsters. Although the main storyline is a single-player with RPG elements, the gameplay is focused on the collection, levelling and growing of these monsters in order to compete against other players in sanctioned arena matches. 

The World Arena is a variant of the game’s regular Arena mode, where players face other players in real-time. Each player competes with their team of monsters, and the battle concludes when a player eliminates all monsters from the opposing team.

SWC2021 World Finals viewership statistics 

The SWC2021 World Finals featured the top eight finalists from around the world, fighting for the title of the Summoners Wars World Champion.

During the 7 hours of Air Time, SWC2021 World Finals garnered 369.3K Hours Watched, showing a 12.6% decline in HW compared to the last year’s edition. 

The event peaked at 68.2K concurrent viewers, which is 30.7% fewer spectators than the World Finals of SWC2020 managed to accumulate. 

As for the average viewership, the championship attracted 52.7K Average Viewers, showing a 33.4% drop in viewership. 

Among the most spectated channels that broadcasted the competition were the developer’s official Twitch channel Com2usUSA and the discipline’s official Youtube channel Summoners War Esports. Moreover, Chinese streamer NeVeR_LosEs managed to place as the third most-watched channel by both Peak Viewer and Hours Watched. 

As illustrated, the World Finals of this year’s SWC series, which was held for the fifth time this year, has become the discipline’s fourth best-performing event by all three metrics. That said, there’s been a visible decline since the discipline’s viewership peak in 2019, indicating a slight decrease in the game’s popularity. 

Based on these statistics, Summoners War can hardly be compared with the most popular mobile titles such as PUBG Mobile of Garena Free Fire. However, the results of the SWC2021 World Finals are roughly comparable with the results of some of the biggest esports leagues, including the recent LFL 2021 Finals, MPL Malaysia Season 8 and Six Sweden Major 2021. 

Language distribution 

When it comes to the language distribution of the SWC2021 World Finals, we can safely assume that the discipline is popular pretty much all around the world, although mainly in the US, Asia and Europe. The most prevalent language by Hours Watched was English, which accounted for 49.9% of total HW.  

The second was Chinese with 12.4%, followed by French (9%) and Thai (8%). Other languages that prevailed in the SWC2021 World Finals broadcasts included Korean, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese and Russian. 

The SWC2021 World Finals, which was held on November 13th, concluded with a match between Australian player and Asia Pacific Cup winner DILIGENT and the European Cup Champion, PINKROID~ of Netherlands. DILIGENT, who was considered the strongest candidate for this year’s championship, won all of his matches and ascended to his title of the 2021 Summoners War champion. 

Despite the minor decline in Summoners War’s viewership in recent years, the discipline seemingly still manages to maintain its popularity and even competes with some of the biggest esports leagues. While it is nothing out of the ordinary for the most popular mobile esport titles, it’s still a great success for a Pokemon-like mobile MMO — a distinctly unique title among the current mobile esports elite.