Esports TV ratings aren’t great … except for Candy Crush

Esports games like Dota 2 and League of Legends have massive global audiences, but most of those viewers consume content online. That has led to somewhat pitiful numbers for esports on television. For example, the Street Fighter V finals at Evo 2017 last weekend only had 180,000 viewers, according to tracking firm Nielsen. And that event only had 122,000 viewers in the key demographic of adults age 18 through 49. Compare that to the show Bar Rescue on Spike TV, which had 757,000 viewers in the same timeslot.

Intelligence firm The Next Level put out an infographic today that provides some numbers for many of the esports competitions that aired on network or cable television. You can see in the chart below that few games broke out, and the ones that did were on network television.