GlobalWebIndex’s Esports Trends Report 2018 is a global study of over 350,000 16-64 year-olds who make up a representative sample of the online population (not total population) of each market. The report provides a high-level, and fairly simplistic, view of the industry as a whole rather than providing the specifics you may desire. It addresses five main areas:
- Esports: where is it now?
- Basic demographic information
- Engagement by country
- The marketing potential in esports
- General media consumption habits
- Top western live streaming sites
- How esports fans discover brands
- What prompts brand advocacy amongst an audience
- The esports gaming landscape
- Games played by esports fans, segmented by region
- Game player and esport viewer overlap by title
- Mobile usage as a gaming device
- Learning from traditional sports – an example
- The future outlook of the industry
Notable takeaways from the Esports Trends Report 2018 are:
- 15% of global internet users are esports fans
- 33% of esports fans are 20-25 years old
- 90% of esports Fans are either deleting cookies, using private browsing windows or blocking ads
- Across the 40 markets surveyed, males aged 16-24 are around 2x, 3x and sometimes even over 4x as likely to be engaging with esports tournaments each month than other demographics
- Mature markets like the US, UK, and Germany have sen some of the biggest increases in engagement
- Esports fans do watch traditional TV – only 3% exclusively watch online TV. In fact, this audience clocks up an average of 1 ¾ hours on their TV sets per day. But what makes them especially interesting is that they’re now devoting almost as much time per day to online TV as they are to linear TV
- Esports Fans are spending over 30 minutes more per day watching online TV than the average internet user, and with each passing quarter we see this metric climb
- Esports fans spend an average of 3 hours a day on social media
- In brand discovery three important themes emerge among esports fans:
- the importance of online video
- a trust towards community-centric marketing
- an affinity towards influencer marketing from relevant personalities
- Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games show a strong correlation of game players to esports fans
- Smartphones are the main device for gaming, but PC and consoles dominate competitive play
- As well as being the most commonly owned device in APAC, smartphones are overwhelmingly cited as internet users’ most important device for getting online
- China and Thailand internet users are spending longer online on their mobiles than all other devices combined. Therefore it’s no great surprise mobile esports is proving most popular in APAC
Click here to download the Esports Trends Report 2018.
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