The MLG spring championships took place over the weekend, causing an existential crisis when I realised that I couldn’t watch both MLG and International Qualifiers at the same time, but then I was rescued by the fact that hard drives exist for a reason, and people tend to record these things. Clearly I was the only one so divided, though, as Sundance DiGiovanni, founder of MLG, posted on twitter that over 4 million people tuned into the MLG streams to watch the weekend’s entertainment.
4 million.
That’s not including all the people tuning into Twitch.tv, or Own3d, or any of the other streams that broadcast what was going on over the weekend. Both of those have been reported at having 50k plus viewers on some streams, and when you consider quite how many streams were going on at any one time, that’s adding up to a hefty figure.
Just to put it in a little context; Major League Baseball’s World Series last year pulled in an average of 16 million viewers over the course of the competition. So that puts League of Legends, Starcraft 2 and E-sports as a whole on a slowly increasing track to rivalling real world sports in a big way. Which is a pretty massive thing, if you think about it for more than two seconds.
And now you can commence heated discussion on who deserved the win more, and whether bathroom breaks between matches should be allowed. And how about that furore over USB headsets? Tut tut.