Results for the official r/esports survey are in

Over the last week we (the r/esports moderators) decided to run a quick survey of our users. For extremely obvious reasons, this data should not be considered statistically significant or representative of all esports fans; it is simply a survey of our small community which is going to be highly skewed towards ‘hardcore’ esports fans.
Either way, I found the results interesting, so I figured I’d collate my thoughts and share them with you all.
First of all, feel free to check out the raw survey results via SurveyMonkey. If you’d like my summary/take then continue reading below..
Game preferences
Here are the most followed games by r/esports users, based on a weighting system where “follow religiously” = 1x, “closely follow” = 0.5x, and “follow irregularly” = 0.25x:
Overwatch 109.75
CS:GO 94
League of Legends 88.75
Dota 2 79
Other 76
Fortnite 58
Smash Bros. 54.5
Rocket League 48.25
PUBG 47
FGC (Street Fighter, Tekken, MK, Injustice, etc) 43.75
StarCraft 31.5
Call of Duty 28
Rainbow 6 25.25
Hearthstone 21
Quake 19
Heroes of the Storm 18.5
My take: It’s interesting to see Overwatch at the top as it is far from the most viewed esport (by my calculation it is solidly #4 at least in the west, but lags behind Dota 2 by a ways).
Perhaps its a bit of recency bias given this was OWL’s first year. It is also worth noting that there is a heavy NA bias in this survey based on # of responses. If you look at just European responses, Dota 2 is the #1 rated in terms of interest with CS:GO and Overwatch close behind.
It was also interesting to see “OTHER” so high up on this list. I would love it if folks could comment below with what their favorite esports are that *weren’t* on my original list. I suspect SMITE, NBA2K, Madden, and FIFA may have been the most notable omissions.
How many esports titles do r/esports fans watch?
Overall, we had 221 responsers to the survey. The average respondent follows:
- 1.9 esports titles “religiously”
- 2.3 esports titles “closely”
- 3.0 esports titles “casually”
Wow, ya’ll some hardcore mfers! These results suggest that the average r/esports user is actually even more hardcore than the, shall we say, “ambitious” Nielson report that suggested that the average esports fan watches 5.7 titles, and completely differs from the FanAI finding that “81% of esports fans only follow one genre." Keep in mind that this is an extremely biased sample size given that r/esports users are likely much more hardcore than tthe average esports fan.
Gender
Gender split was roughly 90/10 Male to Female. I’m not overly surprised by this, but I believe this is far less equitable than overall esports viewership.
Region
- North America 52.94%
- Europe 33.03%
- Oceania 5.43%
- Asia 4.98%
- South America 1.81%
- Middle East 1.36%
- Africa 0.45%
Again no huge surprises here, although I would have expected more of Asian users. Looks like we need to do some outreach!
Age:
- 17 and under 9.95%
- 18 to 24 35.75%
- 25 to 34 44.80%
- 35 to 44 9.05%
- 45 to 54 0.00%
- 55 to 64 0.00%
- 65 and over 0.45%
Again, no big surprises. We already know that the bulk of esports viewers are Male, ages 18–35 from existing research. These results certainly reinforce those findings.
How much time do r/esports users spend watching or chatting about esports?
- 0–1 hour per week 7.73%
- 1–5 hours per week 30.45%
- 6–10 hours per week 22.27%
- 10–15 hours per week 12.73%
- 16–20 hours per week 6.36%
- 21–25 hours per week 3.64%
- 26 or more hours per week 16.82%
Honestly, I had to think hard about this one quite a bit. I spend… too much time on Reddit, Discord etc. Probably more than I actually watch esports broadcasts (barring an event like Evo, BlizzCon, etc). But combined it’s getting up there. Apparently a good chunk of folks consume esports like it is a part time job (27% spend 20+ hours per week).
How hardcore do r/esports fans consider themselves?
Final result: 70. Pretty sure the truth is that the average user of this sub is closer to the 80th or 90th percentile in terms of where they sit on the overall bell curve of esports fandom, but hey. :)
Plenty more to dig into if you’d like to check out the raw survey results. All for now!
~fishy
