League of Legends viewership tops Twitch halfway through 2019

League of Legends is Twitch’s most-watched game in the first half of 2019 and is winning over Fortnite regardless of the latter game’s worldwide surge in popularity.

According to The Esports Observer’s data, League of Legends is the game with the highest total number of hours watched on Twitch in 2019. From January 1 to June 30, League was watched for 512.3 million total hours.

It came as a surprise to many that Fortnite wasn’t at the top of this list. Fortnite has totaled 465 million hours thus far, meaning League was watched almost a full 10% more.

The situation was quite the opposite at the end of 2018 when Fortnite had an almost 20% lead in hours watched over League. However, Fortnite’s fall could’ve been expected.

Fortnite’s viewership has been generally trending downward since March 2018. Even though the game remains popular, it seems to already have reached its peak. This could in part be due to some of Fortnite’s biggest influencers switching to other trending titles, such as new 2019 release Apex Legends.

In the meantime, League of Legends remains an established spectator esport that keeps its viewer base consistently growing. Most of the hours watched come from Riot Games’ official channel, where the developer live streams the LCS and LEC yearly competitions. Much of the rest is contributed from the English stream for the Korean LCK and by popular individual streamers, some of whom are themselves pro players in the LCS, LEC, or LCK.

The release of Teamfight Tactics has also likely helped in boosting League’s viewership.

Third place on the Twitch’s most-watched list is taken by the relatively new Just Chatting category. Just Chatting is a category for casual streams that don’t fall under the talk show category, or simply for those who wish to rest and chat with their viewers between bouts of gameplay.

This spot was taken up by the IRL category in 2018, but Twitch has decided to shut that down and separate it into a greater variety of more specific non-gaming categories.

Just Chatting is but one example of a category that came from IRL, along with ASMR, Art, Sports & Fitness, Food & Drink, and more.