Is esports viewership on the rise in 2025? A deep dive into viewer count

The esports fan base is growing as new ways to watch become available around the world. Comparing the peak viewership of major tournaments between 2024 and 2025 reveals some interesting data, especially regarding how popular esports have become in the past year.

Esports and competitive gaming on the professional level are still very new concepts to many sports fans, but trends prove that it’s steadily moving upward as an industry. Here’s everything you need to know about esports viewership in 2025.

Though 2025 has been a big year for esports, stats from YouTube show that the fan base is stagnant and even declining in some instances. We compared similar YouTube videos from the same tournaments in 2024 and 2025 to see which year had more viewers.

What we found is that top esports games like Fortnite, League of Legends, and VALORANT all received fewer YouTube views for their final tournaments of the year in 2025 compared to 2024. However, the drop was usually low, losing about 10% to 25% of viewers within the year. This doesn’t mean that esports viewership is completely declining, but it does indicate that there’s less interest in 2025, at least for YouTube users.

Looking at YouTube allows us to assess not only live viewership, but also the number of fans who came back and watched the competition later. Many gamers look to other platforms for esports content now, including Twitch and even TikTok, splitting the fan base up between social media apps and making it harder to assess viewership overall.

Viewership for esports throughout 2025 has been solid, but it isn’t record-breaking, so let’s look at what groups are tuning in.

A recent report by Esports Insider found that the bulk of esports viewers live in countries within the Asia Pacific region, including China. Although around 80% come from this section of the world, a significant number of viewers are also based in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Here’s a list featuring the percentage of the population from each area that watches esports.

YouGov also recently found that 18-29-year-olds watched more esports in 2024 compared to 2021, though only by about 4-6%. Younger people from Asian countries tend to be the primary fan base for competitive gaming tournaments, so esports organisations may need to change their approach to gain similar interest from other countries and age groups.

The data shows a similar amount of interest in esports over the past two years, but no notable increase specifically in 2025. The release of generation-defining games like Grand Theft Auto VI over the next few years may create a larger gamer pool, each a potential esports viewer.

Video games have started to appeal to a much wider audience in the 2020s, so there’s no reason to assume that esports viewership will significantly drop off anytime soon. Since countries like China and the Philippines have the most esports fans, tournaments may need to target other countries more aggressively for the industry to grow exponentially.

There’s no doubt that esports have grown over the last decade, although the audience remains largely comprised of younger gamers from Asia. As generations of children grow older, they’ll likely introduce their children to esports as well.

With millions of fans tuning in across the globe, esports will continue to grow as more people enjoy video games and Twitch, but organisations should aim to find new audiences in North America, Africa, and other parts of the world. No matter what the future holds for competitive gaming, it’s clear that fans will always tune into their favourite esports, and 2025 proved that despite not breaking any major records.