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League of Legends Worlds 2019 Breaks the All-Time Peak Concurrent Viewer Count Record on Twitch

Riot's MOBA is Back on Top Passing Fortnite's Record-Breaking Black Hole Stream Last Month

November 10, 2019 by

This year’s League of Legends World Championship tournament in Paris ended early Sunday morning for Twitch’s primary viewer base in the States.

But despite a 4:00 AM West Coast start time and quick 3-0 sweep by FunPlus Phoenix over G2 Esports, that didn’t stop LoL‘s biggest event of the year from breaking records.

Just last month, Fortnite‘s “game-breaking” Black Hole event set the record for most concurrent viewers on Twitch with a peak of 1.6 million viewers. Riot Games’ MOBA easily surpassed that number with 1.7 million viewers tuning into Twitch to watch the Grand Finals of Worlds 2019.

Earlier this year, Fortnite‘s most popular streamer, Ninja, left the platform allowing League of Legends to take back its position as the most watched game on Twitch in 2019 based on average viewers per hour.

Now, LoL also holds the record for 2019’s most watched stream and the most watched event ever on Twitch. Certainly, a great year for Riot Games, whose game struggled last year after the rise of Fortnite and is now making an amazing comeback.

League of Legends‘ biggest competition in the MOBA genre, Dota 2, also had a record-breaking finale earlier this year at The International 2019 with 1.1 million viewers. Valve’s tournament set its own record with a $34 million prize pool.

Despite cutting back on their esports budget and coming nowhere close to topping the biggest prize pool in esports history with only $2 million on the line, Riot’s 10-year-old MOBA impressively continues to stay ahead of the competition at the top.

Riot also just announced that next year’s World Championship event will take place in Shanghai, China. With the recent Blitzchung controversy causing Blizzard so many problems, it’ll be interesting to see how the Chinese-owned company, Riot, handles the situation next year while promoting their own new arsenal of games that looks to take aim at Blizzard’s portfolio.