Top esports video game publishers by watch time

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Video games are the beating heart of the live-streaming industry as it stands today. Streaming on sites like Twitch, which were primarily video game exclusive, has diversified its content and opened up other options for content creators; Special Events on Twitch are some of the most-watched events in live-streaming worldwide. However, the bulk of Twitch’s content is still its video game roots, and other sites which have turned from video games to general live-streaming follow a similar path. 

Streamers and esports professionals receive the recognition they deserve, but publishers and developers get considerably less attention, despite creating the same game the streamers and esports plates will benefit from. Here at Esports Charts, using our tournament organizers tracking and some help from our analyst team, we have created a ranking of the biggest games publishers in esports live-streaming. 

These publishers are not only responsible for publishing the associated esports title but also for supporting and cultivating the competitive scene through tournament organization. The total watch time - Hours Watched - has been collected for each publisher over the first half of 2023. H1 of 2023 statistics will be the focal piece of this article, but we will also draw comparisons to the H1 2022 statistics. 

Important to note, these statistics do not include data from Chinese platforms. This may have impacted games with audiences in the Chinese region.

Top Game Publishers by Esports Viewership, H1 2023

At the top of the rankings is Riot Games with 526M Hours Watched for the first half of 2023. Although they retain their top spot from H1 2022, this came with a large drop in viewership. Riot Games saw a 42% drop in watch time as H1 2023 ended, however, this is the same for everyone on this top-five ranking. Not a singular publisher within the top five managed to increase its watch time coming into 2023. 

Riot Games is well known for its ubiquitous esports titles: League of Legends,  Valorant, and    Teamfight Tactics. But some readers may have noticed     Tencent     , the parent company of Riot Games, is also on this list. For clarity in reading the data, Tencent is considered a publisher for games which it helped create and currently develops the game for esports. League of Legends and Valorant do not fall under the Tencent Umbrella, as Riot Games continues to organise the competitive scene independently.       

In the second spot of these rankings is the famous publisher Valve. Valve has been involved in the video game industry for decades, and they’ve contributed genre-defining titles to gaming. However, mostly important for us in terms of Valve as an esports publisher are three titles: Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Team Fortress 2. Valve received 415M Hours Watched throughout H1 2023 following an expected but disappointing drop from 766M in 2022.

Valve is notorious in gamer culture for being hard to read and for a perceived lack of communication with the fan base. Fans have been waiting decades for a third iteration of many a game series with no news. Despite this, in the esports industry Valve is a publisher to be reckoned with. Valve has lifted CS:GO and Dota 2 up to the top levels of esports, and assisted both financially in terms of prize pools and administratively in terms of major events. 

Following behind Valve is Moonton Games, the only publisher to appear on this list that is credited with only one esports title. Moonton Games developed and published Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, a mobile MOBA game featuring a 5v5 format. Although the game might not be recognisable for a European or American reader, the game is hugely popular in Asia and other regions where mobile gaming is popular, like Brazil. The game is so hugely popular, it holds the record for highest Peak Viewers of any esports game in 2023: 4.27M concurrent viewers. Ultimately, Moonton Games received 258M Hours Watched for H1 of 2023.

Moonton created the MPL, Mobile Legends Professional League, in 2018 to become the official league for professional play. In 2022, the MPL Indonesia Season 9 broke records for watch time, amassing 82.7M Hours Watched. The MPL continues to be hugely successful, with the Indonesian league at the top but the Philippines aren’t far behind. The annual world cup is also a highly prestigious event that draws in huge viewership. The M4 World Championship in 2023 was the most popular event in 2023 and in the history of the game. 

Behind Chinese publisher Moonton is Chinese publisher Tencent. As aforementioned, Tencent will not also receive the watch time for games that it owns, like League of Legends, but doesn’t handle the organization and publishing of. Tencent is mainly on this ranking due to Arena of Valor (also known as Honor of Kings) and PUBG Mobile, both of which are published worldwide by Level Infinite, Tencent’s video game publishing division. 

PUBG Mobile and Arena of Valor are two of the most popular mobile esports titles in the world. The games not only receive huge viewership from their loyal fans but they are also heavily supported by Tencent when it comes to prize pools. PUBG Mobile has one of the largest prize pools so far in 2023 of any game: $9.5M USD. Critical to note, both games are also published by other companies for other regions. PUBG Mobile is handled by Krafton for a Korean audience and Arena of Valor is supported by Singaporean publisher Garena. For these statistics, both publishers receive the Hours Watched of the game in question. 

The last entry in the top five is Activision Blizzard. The American company is handling more games than anyone else on this list. The company is responsible for beloved Blizzard titles like Overwatch and StarCraft, but also Activision’s Call of Duty franchise. The combined forces of both sides of the coin were enough to earn Activision Blizzard 73M Hours Watched for half of the year. 

Activision Blizzard is the only publisher to appear on this ranking that was not present in 2022’s rankings. They managed to outperform Krafton and Garena this year, taking Garena’s fifth place on the ranking. To highlight the drop in viewership between 2022 and 2023, in 2022 73M Hours Watched would have ranked the American publisher 12th on the list. 

A little something extra for our PRO subscribers, take a look at the esports publishers who just missed out on featuring in the top five. Mobile games remain popular and refuse to be ignored, the raw data for this industry claimed a couple of spots between sixth and tenth. 

Other PC esports came into the limelight as well, with some esports disciplines helping their publishers move up the rankings. But not to be outdone, some sports games were also featured among the ranked publishers. 

Of particular interest, no one in this ranking was able to match their H1 2022 statistics. Of all publishers featured in this graphic, not one of them managed to amass half of the watch time they received last year. Publishers in esports continue to support and cultivate the esports scenes of their beloved titles. Although watch time was down in comparison to 2022, the publishers continue to work and build a solid esports scene.