Despite being released almost a decade ago, Dota 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) continue to retain a very loyal following in terms of audience engagement for esports events that are streamed on Twitch. Their player base may have shrunk in recent years, but the data also shows that Twitch viewers are gravitating towards more casual content.

According to a report by Esports Charts, Twitch viewers in general prefer day-to-day broadcasts compared to esports broadcasts. Statistics show that since June 2020, both online and offline tournaments have gathered only around 10 million unique viewers, which is around 10% of all people who spent time watching broadcasts.

When you look at the top 10 most popular Twitch categories by hours watched (HW) for the third quarter of 2020, 5 of them – Just Chatting, GTA V, Among Us, Fall Guys and Minecraft – are not competitive esports titles.

Dota 2 isn’t even a part of this list as it only managed to garner 108.7 million HW and 374,000 peak views, but it is the leader in terms of audience engagement. More than every third viewer occasionally watches esports of this discipline and most of these viewers come from the CIS region.

In comparison, League of Legends, which is by far the most popular esports title on Twitch right now, has an audience engagement of 30.18% despite raking in 794,000 peak viewers and 201.6 million HW.

Similar to Dota 2, the people watching CS:GO on Twitch are also the ones who are most passionate about esports. With an engagement rate of 34.13% and more than 8 million viewers, the esports HW for CS:GO makes up almost 50% of the total HW this quarter.

So, despite what naysayers claim, Dota 2 and CS:GO are not dying games as long as fans continue watching tournaments, and as long as organizers continue organizing them. The two games’ audience rates are phenomenal, considering the fact that other more “trendy” esports titles only manage to clock in a rate of between 11.5 and 24 percent.