E-Sports - The Hype is Real.
By: Mirabelle Tseng
Tags: Esports, Gaming, Customer Experience, Big Data, Social Media

E-Sports - The Hype is Real.

League of Legends has dominated the online gaming market since approximately 2012. During that time, League of Legends had about 12 million people a day, and around 32 million unique players every month. 4 years later, League of Legends is still growing, and currently has over 70 million players a month. This record had never been achieved before, not even by other super popular games like World of Warcrafts, DoTa or Starcraft.

A lot of people still argue that E-Sports are not real sports, and they’d tell you clicking on your mouse and tapping on your keyboard does not count as a sport! While it’s true that gaming is hardly athletic, it is not as easy as some people think it is. It takes extreme dedication, practice and talent to be on top. It doesn’t even matter if League of Legends is considered a real sport or not, its viewership tops the audience of many traditional sports. E-sports is more successful than many sports around the world.

Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, has been devoting a lot of resources on developing the E-Sports scene, and one of the things it does is to host annual League of Legends World Championship Series. The world championship title is the highest recognition a pro League player can achieve. Riot Games hosts World Series in different regions every year, and it took place in different nations in Europe last year. This year, it is back to the USA, and will be played in 4 different cities, starting from San Francisco, Chicago, New York and conclude in the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

Riot Games has created the hashtag #Worlds on Twitter for fans to chat about what they think about the World Series, and it’s a trending hot topic on Twitter. Let’s use the Stratifyd Signals data analytics platform to take a look at how #Worlds is taking over Twitter by storm.

Signals extracted and analyzed approximately 10,000 comments from Twitter

From the feedback and contributor ratio, it is easy to see that most commenters are repeat commenters.

We’ll start from Geo Hotspots.

As mentioned earlier, League of Legends is popular in many countries around the globe, and it has teams from Europe, North America, South Korea, Taiwan, Brasil an Russia participating, which explains why the Geo Hotspots are literally everywhere on the map. We do see the most comments coming from North America, but it doesn't mean NA is the biggest market for League of Legends, we need to take into consideration that most Chinese fans don't use Twitter as much, and China is considered to have the most viewers.

When we examine the Buzzword section, we can basically understand the story people are discussing about. Albus Nox Luna, the wildcard team from Russia, who NOBODY expected anything from, has become the first wildcard team to ever advance to the quarter finals. It's the hottest topic in League of Legends worlds and the number 1 trending topic on Reddit.com.

If you shift your focus to top contributors, you can see that there are channels dedicated to discuss League of Legends and many other loyal fans that participate in the discussion regularly. If you look closely, you’ll discover that most active commenters are male, which makes sense since League of Legends is a male dominant game so far.

Focusing attention on the Temporal Trends, notice that comments peaked at 11:20 PM on Oct 6th, when Albus Nox Luna secured their spot in the quarter finals by defeating the ROX Tigers, the team who is the biggest favorite to win the whole tournament. This is a Cinderella story, and apparently everyone loves the underdog. Many fans call it the biggest upset in League of Legends history, picture Davis versus Goliath, yeah, the giant fell.

Many traditional sports are facing a problem of losing fans, or having difficulty of getting fans to attend live events. League of Legends on the other hand, encounters a different challenge, which is how to break the 5 year curse of online games. A lot of online games can attract large amounts of players in the beginning, but the enthusiasm usually starts to die out after 3 to 5 years, and get replaced by other newer, cooler games. How to make sure League of Legends stays visually updated and mechanically competitive is one of the main concerns for Riot Games now. Other than the game play aspect, it is also important to make sure players are happy with their gaming experience and perceive this game positively.

In order to understand and improve player experience, Riot Games sends out questionnaires before every new season begins, asking what the fans would want to see. As an avid League of Legends player, I have gotten and responded to these surveys. Riot Games has stated that they have a lot of player feedback data but it will take time to go through everything and address the issues players are not satisfied with. This here is an obstacle many companies encounter. They have the data, they just don’t have the time or tool to analyze it. If this happens to be the difficulty your business faces, the answer is a data analytics tool that’s fast, powerful and easy to use, like Signals.

Are you interested in using Signals on analyzing large volumes of structured and unstructured data? Visit our website and sign up for your free trial today! We’d love to help you weed through data and get the insights you need.