MLBB Retains Viewership Lead at EWC 2026, While League of Legends Demonstrates Record Growth

Following the first four weeks of the Esports World Cup 2026, clear leaders in viewership have emerged. Although the absolute top spot remains with the mobile game Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, League of Legends showed the best growth dynamics compared to last year.

The MLBB Mid-Season Cup, which concluded on August 1 with Team Spirit's victory over Yangon Galacticos, gathered the largest audience at this year's EWC. The most popular was the playoff match between ONIC and Aurora Gaming, which peaked at 2.89 million viewers. For comparison, the grand final of the tournament was watched by 1.9 million people.

Although the peak figure turned out to be slightly lower than the 2025 results, currently no other discipline has been able to come close to these numbers. A significant role in this success was played by MPL Indonesia's YouTube and TikTok channels, which generated over 5 million hours of watch time.

For its part, League of Legends demonstrated the best year-over-year growth at the tournament. Peak viewership increased by 22%, and total watch time grew by 31%, even despite having less airtime compared to last year. Average viewership stopped at the 632,000 mark, representing a 33.5% increase.

Such explosive growth in interest in LoL is driven by several key factors:

• Participation of the world's most popular teams: The presence of the T1 and Karmine Corp organizations significantly impacted the statistics. Their semifinal match became the most popular in the discipline, peaking at 1.475 million viewers. In contrast, the final between Karmine Corp and the tournament's unexpected winners, Dplus KIA, gathered only 1.02 million viewers.
• Tournament expansion: An increase in the total number of participating teams.
• Impact of community casters: Streamer Caedrel became the most popular independent commentator of the first weeks of EWC. He contributed 3.5 million hours of watch time, averaging over 95,000 viewers per broadcast.

Although tournaments for popular games like Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG Mobile have yet to kick off, it is unlikely they will be able to break MLBB's records.

This year's CS2 tournament will take place in a two-week format with double the participants, which guarantees significant growth in average concurrent viewership and hours watched. However, considering that the 2025 peak was just over 700,000 viewers, quadrupling that number seems unattainable.

A similar situation is expected with PUBG Mobile. Despite retaining the $3 million prize pool and expanding the participant list by 8 teams, the discipline will have to at least double its peak from last year to get close to MLBB. It is expected that the growth of these shooters will mainly occur due to an increase in average viewership and the total time the audience spends watching broadcasts.

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