Posted Wed Dec 7, 2011 at 08:30 AM PST by Dick Ward
Professional gaming is on its way up in the states, with up to 241,000 peak viewers for the MLG alone.
It's been a real uphill battle to get eSports growing in the states, but over the last few years things have been improving in a big way. The MLG championships on the weekend of November 18th drew in a whopping 241,000 concurrent viewers. MLG boasts a total of 3.5 million unique viewers across their competitions for this year.
A few hundred thousand may not seem like much, but even the biggest competitions held in the U.S. last year didn't break the 100,000 concurrent viewer mark - now in 2011 the MLG has gotten more than double.
Major League Gaming CEO Sundance DiGiovanni says that these viewership numbers are encouraging, especially in the all important young male demographic. "Our live streams of the Pro Circuit National Championships garnered more 18-24 male viewers than Comedy Central, MTV, TBS, and FX draw in an average quarter hour and nearly as many as Adult Swim," he says.
In 2011, MLG featured 'StarCraft II,' 'Halo: Reach,' 'Call of Duty: Black Ops' and 'League of Legends.' Nothing has been announced for 2012 yet, but you can expect things to kick off again in the spring.
Source: Major League Gaming
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