What is eSports?
eSports (electronic sports) is a term for organized, competitive gaming. These can be played by individuals or teams and can take the form of video games, board games, or any other type of game that can be competed in. If you need a refresher on the difference between video games and eSports,
“Video Games vs. eSports : What’s the Difference?”
eSports is growing in popularity and can be divided into different genres. Today we want to take a closer look at the most popular eSports games played in Canada by genre. We’ve added some data from other countries as well for comparison. The players below come from public accounts like TwitchTV (livestreaming) where they broadcast their gameplay online for anyone to watch and then commentate over it with audio which is not included here if available.
We have been receiving a lot of requests on which games are most popular in eSports Canada. To answer this question, we ran some data analysis using our extensive game-level user base. This is an interesting topic because it allows us to look at how certain countries’ pro scenes compare to others and where each country’s players like to play the game (PC vs Console).
Since releasing our Global Heatmap , many users reached out to us asking if they can dig deeper into specific regions. The good news is that our platform supports displaying any region you want! We decided to plot all of North America (Canada + USA). See below:
Our map shows that League of Legends (LoL) has the widest appeal in terms of active players. LoL has very fragmented geography with strong pockets of players in Washington DC, Southern California, Texas, Montreal and the surrounding areas. This map shows that the majority of LoL players are PC gamers. On the other hand, Halo 4 is clearly dominated by console players – an interesting observation for a country that was not known to have a very strong console eSports scene until recently .
We can also see that Call of Duty (COD) has quite an active player base compared to previous years. We expect COD to grow even further since their last installment Advanced Warfare got extremely positive reviews from both critics and gamers alike. As seen on our Regional League Gaming Matches heatmap , there are already numerous amateur tournaments being hosted throughout North America so it will be interesting to see which regions will develop a strong eSports scene and how it will compare to other countries’.
One of the most surprising results we found was the lack of Halo Reach players. The game is almost 5 years old (released in 2010) which might explain why there are only ~60,000 active players as it seems like many people moved on from that installment. It would be interesting to track its player base over the years and see if they stop playing after certain updates or map releases!
It’s also worth noting that some games such as Soul Calibur V (2011), Dead Space (2008) and even FIFA 2013 had quite active player bases, hinting at resurgence for those franchises on future titles/installments. As always, this information is only representative of our data but we hope you enjoy this interactive map!
