The Evolution Championship Series (commonly known as Evo), which took place last weekend, is the largest competitive fighting game competition in the world. After breaking several records, it is now also the largest spectator e-sport event in the world.
During the event, held in Las Vegas from July 29th-31st and streamed on Ustream, over 2 million unique viewers tuned in to the live stream to watch thousands of the best players from 44 countries compete in the championships. Viewers consumed over 1.9 million hours of video content, and tuned in for an average of 55 minutes each.
Evo also took over Facebook and Twitter with top Evo players becoming globally trending topics on Twitter (and many others trending locally). During the exciting finals on July 31st, they were so popular that four players in the finals were trending simultaneously, making Evo players four of the world’s top 10 trending topics on Twitter.
With over 2,400 competitors and thousands of fans in attendance, Evo 2011 was the best-attended fighting game tournament in history, as competitors battled through the double-elimination brackets for titles across Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Mortal Kombat, Tekken 6, and BlazBlue Continuum Shift 2.
This was by far the most exciting year to watch and I would love to make it out there next year. There were so many surprises and hype moments this year. Eight year old Noah defeating grown men and making top 48 in MvC3, DR Ray almost making a great comeback against Mike Ross only to literally blow himself up at the last second, Justin Wong getting perfected and sent home, PR Rog’s amazing Tron comeback to reset the bracket in grand finals, Poongko perfecting Daigo, the Street Fighter god himself, and of course the American Latif surprising everybody by eliminating not only Daigo but also Tokido and Poongko. So hype!