日本語での解説は英語に続きございます。
General
This is an Esports Tier List sorted by minutes watched for Japanese gaming competition broadcasts. Its purpose is to indicate what titles are deemed popular domestically to Japan. Do not misconstrue these numbers as indicators of the game's overall popularity. The data here is only reflective of their esports status. This is purely a display of data. We do not wish to shine a negative light on any parties mentioned.
Let us explain details of data used. For each game title, we investigated how much viewership was generated from competitive tournament/event livestream held in Japan. Viewership here means Minutes Watched (MW). MW is an integration of all users’ session time spent on the livestream. MW covers only Japan domestic events, and viewership from around the globe. We did not include livestreams from Individuals, or MW generated from VOD/archives.
Livestream covers online live video platforms available in Japan.
Official, third party or unofficial events were all counted, and was not weighted by weather which type the event belonged to. Discussions among domestic/global and official/unofficial are described in “Specific.”
MW is not a statistics provided by Japanese events. Therefore, we measured for each game title, and projected as a tier list. Order does not make a difference among same tier.
Specific
■ Why Minutes Watched Provides The Best Statistics
Most common measures used in Japan’s market segment are PV(Page Views) and UU(Unique Users). However, we picked Minutes Watched because we believe in what this number offers.
PV and UU are only accumulation of footprints that users have actually visited. On the other hand, MW is integration of engagement.
Modern value of entertainment can be measured from users’ minutes spent on the service. That is why disposable time matters beyond genre.
Also, performance of online video style advertisement usually considers users’ MW. Therefore, if you wish to bring sponsors by relating your esports event as a media of advertisement, MW matters.
■ Global Viewership
After picking up competitive events/tournaments run in Japan, viewership from both domestic and global were counted. As a result, fighting games (where Japanese players have good results globally) and PC games (not the most popular in Japan but strong popularity among global) had strong benefits.
First we thought about putting whether this game title is popular among global market into consideration. This was our first idea because we believed in global competition. However, we eventually did not because there was no established and widely recognized measures for that. Therefore, getting global MW involved is an aspect of realizing our first idea.
On the other hand, we did not add “MW generated from Japan users watching events overseas.” We believe activeness of the scene means events in the country itself. This is similar to GDP vs GNI : usually nations pick GDP as an indicator of the country.
■ Official vs Non-Official
In Japanese market segment, most games’ MW came from publisher-run first party official events, runner-up by third party industrial events. There was, however, some exceptions. Some game titles, especially fighting games, had stable proportion of MW from user/community run events. For example, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate had most of the MW, not to say all, from user run tournaments.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive had no first party event in Japan, thus third party or community run event generated 100% of its MW. Without a doubt, Super Smash Bros. Melee had 100% from community.
■ League of Legends
Among all game titles we considered, League of Legends were by far the largest MW holder. This was enough to create Tier0 just for this single title.
This is because LJL (pro league in Japan that leads to MSI/Worlds) has long tradition here, with physical spectator seat tickets that takes place in actual theater in Shibuya. Several hundred fans appear every week for the professional game and thousands for their national finals. Other game titles were nowhere close to this experience.
Lastly
