Game developers don’t make esports — the fans do.
The online community-tournament website Battlefy revealed today that its user base has grown by 750 percent year-over-year. It claims this makes it the largest and fastest-growing esports tournament service on the Internet — a space where it competes with Challonge and Toornament. But as Battlefy continues to strengthen, it also has a unique perspective on the kinds of games that regular people want to spend their time competing in.
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Here’s how the activity breaks down by genre:
- MOBA (i.e. League of Legends, Dota 2): 64 percent
- Collectible card games (i.e. Hearthstone): 11 percent
- First-person shooter (i.e. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive): 8 percent
- Strategy/simulation (i.e. Pokémon): 6 percent
- Fighting (i.e. Street Fighter IV): 4 percent
- Real-time strategy (i.e. StarCraft 2): 2 percent
- Massively multiplayer online (i.e. Guild Wars 2): 2 percent
Unsurprisingly, games like Dota 2 and League of Legends make up more than two-thirds of all the tournaments on Battlefy. That makes sense — the audience for those games is enormous, and it’s getting bigger with the rise of publisher Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm. But the MOBA space is well saturated, which means that other genres are growing even faster.
Both first-person shooter and card battlers are bringing in bigger audiences at a faster rate than other genres. Games like Counter-Strike and Hearthstone are more popular than ever, and that has the shooter genre up 362 percent year-over-year and card game up 255 percent, according to Battlefy stats.
Finally, Battlefy noted that its gamers set up tournaments for more than 76 different releases last month. Here were the 15 most popular in alphabetical order:
- Arena: Cyber Evolution
- Call of Duty:Advanced Warfare
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Cross Fire
- Dota 2
- FIFA 15
- Guild Wars 2
- Hearthstone
- Heroes of the Storm
- League of Legends
- Marvel vs. Capcom Ultimate 3
- Pokémon
- Rocket League
- Smite
- Super Smash Bros. for Wii U