Credit: Blizzard Entertainment
The Hearthstone World Championship leads all channels with 3.1M hours watched as Jaryd “Summit1g” Lazar sees a drop in viewership after changing from Grand Theft Auto V.
Every week, The Esports Observer releases a list of the top 10 Twitch 
channels, ranked by total number of hours watched for the week, from Monday through Sunday, with data compiled using TEO Analytics.
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Play Your Cards Right
The League of Legends Championship Series
might be on a break, but that hasn’t kept esports from leading all channels on Twitch, as the Hearthstone World Championship top this week’s chart with 3.1M hours watched.
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The event ran from Wednesday to Sunday in Taipei with a $1M USD prize pool, and some of its top sessions included an 11-hour session that started late Saturday night on the east coast with an average of 77K concurrent viewers. Despite the less than optimal broadcast hours for the final day of action in America, Sunday also peaked at 141K CCV for the finals.
Earlier this month Hearthstone also made a buzz on Twitch with the release of a new card expansion—Rise of Shadows. The expansion helped Hearthstone generate 10M hours watched from April 8-14, but that wasn’t as strong as the title performed on Twitch surrounding an expansion that happened at the same time last year.
Change of Pace?
Jaryd “Summit1g” Lazar is known for his ability to seamlessly transition to a new game and mobile viewers on Twitch, but this week his attempt at playing a new title has led to a short-term drop in viewership.
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For most of this month, Lazar has led all broadcasters with his Grand Theft Auto V role play streams, but this past week he decided to dabble in online survival game Miscreated, which was released in December.
While Lazar’s GTA streams from early in the week produced 27K CCV, he took a hit by deciding to move games and ended the week averaging 19K CCV for 29 hours of Miscreated play. The average was strong enough to keep Lazar in the top 10, but it wasn’t good enough to put him in the same realm as other streamers in the top echelon like Turner “Tfue” Tenney.
Two Times the Fun
Dota 2 yet again had two esports-related channels reach the top 10, this week for the OGA Dota PIT Minor Spaladium Arena in Split, Croatia. Combined, the channels had more hours watched than the Hearthstone World Championship which led all channels this week.
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As has been the case a few times this year, the Russian-language broadcast generated comparable viewership to the English-language broadcast reaching 1.8M hours watched, up from 1.4M hours watched on the official English-language channel.
Earlier this year, the DreamLeague Season 11 Major had a Russian-language broadcast that averaged more viewership than the English-language counterpart. Last week, ESL
One Mumbai generated more hours watched on a Russian-language channel than it did on its English-language broadcast.
