Street Fighter at Evo 2017 Tops League of Legends’ Viewer Count Over the Weekend

The biggest fighting game tournament of the year lived up to the hype with the Street Fighter V main event at Evo 2017 bringing in over two hundred thousand concurrent viewers on Twitch — enough to just barely top League of Legend’s on Sunday, which saw its viewers down 13% from the same time last year.

Although Evo 2017’s main event wasn’t enough to take the number one spot on Twitch from CS:GO’s second major of the year with a $1 million prize pool, it was still enough to just barely top Evo 2016’s peak of 203k concurrent viewers and to set a new all-time high viewer count for SFV.

Here were last week’s top 10 most watched games on Twitch:

1. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – 586,590 viewers
2. Street Fighter V – 206,260 viewers
3. League of Legends – 200,478 viewers
4. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – 152,301 viewers
5. Tekken 7 – 143,017 viewers
6. Super Smash Bros. Wii U – 138,193 viewers
7. Super Smash Bros. Melee – 119,762 viewers
8. BlazBlue: Centralfiction – 108,407 viewers
9. Overwatch – 92,321 viewers
10. Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 – 88,663 viewers

Based on the top 10 list, there weren’t any huge upsets at this year’s Evo and the viewer counts aligned with each game’s placement in the schedule. Tekken 7 and SSB Wii U were both right before SFV on Sunday and SSB Melee was Saturday night’s main event.

Meanwhile, other finals on Saturday saw much lower viewer counts. Injustice 2 only pulled in a peak of 42,791 viewers at #14 and Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2 came in right behind at #15 with 42,691 viewers. Friday night’s main event, The King of Fighters XIV was the least watched at #24 with 34k viewers.

We originally predicted that it might be too soon for Tekken 7 to take the top spot at Evo 2017. But if Tekken can stop its playerbase from continuing to decline, there’s still a good chance that continued support from the FGC could be what it takes to dethrone Street Fighter in 2018.