During the third quarter of 2024, numerous top esports titles hosted major Summer tournaments, while some disciplines concluded their seasons with grand finales. This period featured several of the year’s most popular events across mobile gaming, MOBAs, and shooting games. Esports Charts has compiled two separate top-ten rankings for the quarter’s standout competitions: one based on total watch time and another on peak concurrent viewership.
In general, the leading events of Q3 2024 spanned five of esports’ most prominent titles, with mobile gaming still outpacing traditional PC esports. The remaining spots were largely filled by popular and long-standing shooters and MOBAs, which continue to draw massive audiences.
Most watched esports events of Q3 2024
The Indonesian regional esports circuit for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang once again topped the quarter as the most-watched esports event. The MPL Indonesia Season 14 began in August and will finish later this month, at the end of October. During Q3, the event managed to garner 71.19M Hours Watched, and has collected millions more since the beginning of October. By the end of this event, it may be able to become one of the most-watched MPL events ever.
Staying in the MOBA category, League of Legends held the next-most-watched event and also contributed another event to our ranking here. The 2024 Worlds event began only a week before the end of Q3, but it still managed to accumulate 23.18M Hours Watched and become one of the quarter’s top events. The LCK Summer 2024 had more time to generate viewership throughout the quarter, and represented League of Legends on an industry-leading scale. The Korean audience for League of Legends is powerful, and they continue to prove this potential quarter after quarter.
Dota 2 was also particularly popular throughout Q3, having held its end-of-season The International 2024 event in September. This iteration of The International was not close to the event’s top-performing peaks, but it still managed to become one of the quarter’s most-watched events. The third-party Riyadh Masters 2024, which was part of the Esports World Cup 2024 calendar, also ranked highly with 26.3M Hours Watched.
The Esports World Cup also contributed the EWC X MLBB Mid Season Cup 2024, the first iteration of ML:BB’s new international event. The event was highly successful as ML:BB’s first major tournament held outside of Asia, ranking as one of the quarter’s highest watch times, and reaching millions of concurrent viewers at peak.
In the shooter scene, Valorant led the way ahead of Counter-Strike 2. Valorant held its end-of-year VALORANT Champions 2024 event in August, reaching 46.9M Hours Watched. The 2024 Champions did not break any records for the series, but it still managed to outperform the smaller Counter-Strike events that took place during the same quarter.
Across Counter-Strike, the ESL Pro League Season 20 was the most-watched event of the quarter, outperforming IEM Cologne 2024. The EPL event was almost double the length of the IEM tournament, which helped it generate millions more hours of watch time. The EPL Season 20 also recorded the series’ highest peak viewership ever, on the other hand, IEM Cologne was not able to recreate the record-breaking viewership it achieved in the past two years.
In the final spot of our ranking, the Arena of Glory Winter 2024 event for Arena of Valor generated 15.7M Hours Watched for the quarter. The event is still not over, with more matches to be played throughout the rest of October. The Arena of Glory series, the Vietnamese professional circuit for AoV, has been one of the esports title’s most popular series in recent years, and 2024 has seen it outperform nearly every AoV event of the year.
Most watched esports events of Q3 2024
In terms of peak concurrent viewership, the representation of genres and esports titles remains largely the same. ML:BB once again led the way, this time with 2.38M Peak Viewers for the Mid-Season Cup this year. The mobile gaming title is massively popular in Southeast Asia, and fans of the title are readily happy to watch all kinds of events, from international events like the MSC to the regional MPL Indonesian circuit’s 14th season.
The LCK once again represented the top step of League of Legends viewership, this time with the LCK Regional Finals 2024. The event reached 1.82M Peak Viewers, far outperforming even what the first week of the Worlds 2024 event was able to manage. Dota 2 was also decently popular, although it lagged slightly behind League of Legends.
Valorant again outperformed Counter-Strike, with the end-of-year event too powerful in comparison to Counter-Strike’s non-major tournaments. In general, Q3 was full of esports events from many of the world’s favourite genres. MOBA and shooters again remain as esports’ most popular genres, with mobile gaming leading the charge ahead of traditional PC games.
Q3 2024 saw Valorant perform ahead of Counter-Strike, but the latter shooter did not host a major event on the scale of the Valorant Champions 2024 extravaganza. In the MOBA genre, regional League of Legends events were able to outperform Dota’s The International, the Korean audience for the MOBA title outperforming Dota’s global potential.
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