The month PUBG beat League
In 2011, JustinTV had just re-branded into TwitchTV and there I found myself working with leading French Starcraft 2 shoutcasters Pomf & Thud and their crew, with whom we later on co-founded O’Gaming TV.
As we were getting ready to produce the 1st installment of the Iron Squid SC2 tournament, we got in talks with Twitch regarding exclusive broadcasting and a sponsorship. Back then, SC2 still had tons of hype but League of Legends was already starting to get really big in live streams: maybe it was already #1 in late 2011… What’s for sure though is that it was #1 by mid 2012.
2012 is also the year that saw the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops II which, I noticed back then as I was monitoring Twitch viewerships “manually”, was performing way better than its predecessor in live streams, and successors as well as we all could see later on.
This dance of games on top of Twitch had me very much interested and I thought it’d be the same for other, more and more, people in the field. So for that reason and a couple others, I decided I wanted to create Gamoloco sometime in late 2012.
After struggling to find support on the engineering side — the story of my life — the site went live in summer of 2014, ages later it seemed to me.
The 1st day we started collecting data, League of Legends was #1, with a huge margin.
Up until August 2017, for 34 full months straight that is, it remained in the #1 spot. No game even came close to changing that. Even CSGO pushed by Majors, even DOTA2 during TI: no game could compete with League of Legends across an entire month.
At some point, in a way it became worrying that such a “closed” game couldn’t be challenged.
Where was growth going to come from for our field?
March 2017 at last came with an answer, that got confirmed for good this past August. A new game, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, has been all the rage since its small-scale release as an early-access title on Steam.
After beating a lot of spectacular milestones, PUBG claimed the #1 spot in August on Twitch. And at almost the same time it also became the #1 game on Steam… In a few weeks from now, it will hit consoles.
There’s a big chance PUBG could be the #1 game in the world in 2018, period.
That kind of landslide, that’s what our field needed, for the fun of it and also to send several messages:
- With its many groundbreaking qualities and stellar game design, League of Legends is not the ultimate live streaming / esports game
- AAA publishers, incl Activision Blizzard, have all been doing it wrong for years when it comes to live streaming and esports, proving in the process their lack of understanding of passionate gamers (as opposed to their huge business success with the casual audience)
- A lot is to be explored in terms of live streaming and esports-ready games for the future: video games are in their infancy. Everything is to be invented. We need more truly gutted creators in the business! To generate more entertainment, more fun, more value for everyone involved
Looking forward to how PUBG will develop in the future! And to more groundbreaking new games for everyone to enjoy.
