League of Legends leads Fortnite as Twitch's most viewed game of 2019

Looking at the first six months of 2019, League of Legends is currently the frontrunner for the most popular game on Twitch in terms of hours of viewership, according to data gathered and published by The Esports Observer.

The near-decade-old free-to-play MOBA has nabbed 512.3 million hours of viewership on Twitch between January 1 and June 30, 2019. In that same span of time Fortnite has charted only 465 million hours of viewership, despite leading 2018's viewership rankings by this point in the year last time around.

The full report on The Esports Observer lays out details on the viewership for the top games of the year so far on Twitch, offering game developers a look at how trends have shifted both in the first half of this year, and compared to 2018’s final numbers.

For instance, year-over-year viewership of Fortnite has fallen from 513.1 million hours in the first half of 2018 to 465 million so far this year. Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto V is a title that saw a year-over-year boost. In the first half of 2018 the game ranked 9th with 58.8 million hours viewed. By that same point this year, Grand Theft Auto V is the third most popular video game, and has 269.1 million hours viewed. 

Last year’s third place video game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds didn’t even make 2019’s top 10.

While individual rankings have shifted between last year and 2019, the games and categories featured in the two data excerpts haven’t changed much. Fortnite, League of Legends, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Grand Theft Auto V, and World of Warcraft all rank within the top 10 on both lists. The only new faces for 2019’s list are Apex Legends, and Twitch’s ‘Just Chatting' category, which itself is somewhat of a replacement for Twitch’s former IRL category.