People might care more about the League of Legends finals than the Super Bowl one day.
As you can see in the chart above, all MOBAs combined acquire more Facebook likes than most sports, according to a new report by Adobe Digital Index on gaming trends. Only the NBA, which is popular across the world, ranked higher. This shows that esports, especially games in the popular MOBA genre, resonate with the social media crowd. Esports will generate $1.8 billion a year by 2020, according to Colin Sebastian, analyst at R.W. Baird. It’s one of gaming’s fastest-growing sectors. It was a $200 million industry in 2014.
Facebook likes aren’t a precise measurement for popularity, but it’s still an impressive feat for these kinds of games to generate more interest on Facebook than the Major League Baseball and NFL (yes, even the NFL). However, Adobe Analytics also shows that MOBAs have far fewer social media mentions. So, while people like MOBAs, they don’t talk about them online as much as they do traditional sports.
League of Legends is the most popular MOBA, with over 67 million unique players every month. “‘Jerry World’ [Dallas Cowboy’s Stadium] would have to be filled 603 times to accommodate the monthly players of League of Legends,” said Adam Lloyd, an analyst at Adobe Digital Index, in the report.
Esports continue to march toward mainstream status, and Adobe Insight’s report just gives us another indication that it’ll get there sooner rather than later.
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