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League of Legends takes top-viewed Twitch game back from Fortnite in 2019

According to a year-end report on Twitch views, League of Legends has re-solidified its place as the most viewed game on the platform while Fortnite took a dip.
TJ Denzer
TJ Denzer
1

As we come to the end of 2019, there’s plenty to talk about in this great year of gaming. Esports was as amazing as ever and livestreaming became a battleground like no other thanks to the efforts of growth by platforms like Facebook Gaming and Mixer. At the end of the day, personalities are important, but the games still serve as the foundation, and League of Legends proved itself once again to be one of the kings of livestreaming viewership. According to a recent report, League took its place back from Fortnite as the top viewed game on Twitch of 2019.

This report comes from streaming tool group StreamElements and Arsenal.gg, who published their year-end State of the Stream 2019 report on December 19, 2019. Following the year in which Fortnite came out and was a world-wide phenomenon, the game cooled down in 2019, dropping from its astronomical stat of 1.2 billion+ hours watched on Twitch in 2018 to just over 884 million hours watched this year. Meanwhile, League of Legends continued to climb. It didn’t reach anywhere near Fortnite’s 2018 heights, but it still moved the bar from over 929 million last year to 990 million in 2019.

Even though Fortnite showed a substantial drop between 2018 and 2019, it's still kept quite the audience. Meanwhile, League of Legends continued to steadily climb.
Even though Fortnite showed a substantial drop between 2018 and 2019, it's still kept quite the audience. Meanwhile, League of Legends continued to steadily climb.

Fortnite is still holding out respectively. It was, after all, also the second most viewed game on YouTube in their 2019 YouTube Rewind as well, though it trailed substantially behind Minecraft. Either way, the game still has plenty of life in it, even if it’s not as much as in 2018, but that’s sort of like saying a god is now simply a king. The regular updates like Fortnite Chapter 2 and movie tie-ins like the recent Star Wars events are certainly showing Fortnite’s life and its relevance in pop culture.

Even so, League of Legends was holding the record for years before Fortnite came along, and it seems the game has once again achieved its place on top. Riot has a winning formula for viewership and streamers alike and will likely to continue to serve as the bar against which all games on Twitch are measured for quite a while.

There’s plenty of other info to glean from the State of the Stream 2019 report, such as the growth of Mixer and Facebook Gaming through 2019 and the breakout new IPs like Apex Legends that made their mark on the streaming charts, so be sure to check out the full report for more info on this year in Twitch.

Senior News Editor
Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.

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