Every time you think PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds couldn’t possibly achieve something big again, the game surprises you and the list of accolades just keeps on growing. A few days after passing 600,000 concurrent players on Steam, it’s now been revealed that viewers on Twitch watched more hours of PUBG than League of Legends last week, according to Twitch viewership data site Gamoloco.
For the week starting on Aug. 6, there were 30.6 million hours of Dota 2 watched. With The International 7 event going on, that’s to be expected. But second on the list is PUBG at 16.9 million hours, ahead of League of Legends’ 15 million. Gamoloco said that this is the first time in three years of monitoring Twitch that League has been beaten by a game whose viewership wasn’t pushed by a top tier esports event. Twitch viewership is almost always dominated by whichever game has an esports event happening at the time, as was the case with Dota 2, but to see PUBG on that same list is impressive. “It’s key to understand here that no AAA industry blockbuster even came close to that kind of performance on Twitch,” said Gamoloco’s report. “And no other ‘top tier esports candidate,’ including the highly-heralded Overwatch, got close either.” PUBG is routinely at or near the top of Twitch’s game directory. It has high-powered talent and popular broadcasters like Lirik, DrDisRespect, Shroud, Grimmmz, and more playing it nearly every single day—so this kind of viewership should come as no surprise.
