The viewer numbers are in for the ESPN2 showing of EVO 2016’s Street Fighter V finals.
Yankees/Red Sox averaged 2.066 million on ESPN.
EVO World Championships: 201K on ESPN2.
— Sports TV Ratings (@SportsTVRatings) July 19, 2016
This is on top of the 213,927 watching on Twitch (in all languages), with 182,716 watching the main stream.
These numbers are actually comparable to ELEAGUE in recent weeks. The one exception to this would be in week 3 (June 10th), when the NBA Finals were also airing:
Interesting that a 1-hour repeat of @EL #ELEAGUE in Week 7 got more viewers than the Week 8 LCQ Semi-Finals #in pic.twitter.com/o5ueoUOiyA
— Manny Anekal (@mannyanekal) July 19, 2016
EVO proved that the FGC can at the very least run with the other esports in terms of television viewership. We have to wonder if this is the dawn of a new era for the FGC – every TO out there is going to see these numbers, and surely will be talking to ESPN in the coming years.
UPDATE: Chad Gutstein, CEO of Machinima, provides this interesting bit of context via Twitter:
@Machinima series Chasing The Cup on @TheCW had triple the viewership of EVO on @ESPN https://t.co/RfbeINOpgO via @pvplive
— Chad Gutstein (@chadgutstein) July 19, 2016