While 2021 remains perhaps the best year for Chess when it comes to its event on livestreaming and the sheer number of popular content creators and influencers playing it, the last two years have not been half as bad. The sport has continued to add more events to its calendar while reaching more corners of the globe and attracting more players.
Moreover, a lot of professional Chess players are moving to broadcast the game, either full-time or occasionally, helping bring a more educated audience base to the game and its various tournaments and formats. In fact, the likes of World No 2 Hikaru Nakamura revealing that he could move to livestreaming permanently while cutting back on his competitive play spells a scenario where more such cases happen in the future.
For now, the game is in a good space, witnessing substantial year-on-year watch time improvements across major platforms like YouTube and Kick in 2024. What helped was the increase in the number of tournaments, which almost doubled from 37 in 2023 to 67 last year.
Organizers like Chess.com, Chess24, and Norway Chess continue to expand their calendars, adding more tournaments and allowing more talents to come through and show their potential. They also run year-long series like the Grand Chess Tour and the Champions Chess Tour where fans get to see the top players in the world battle it out for bragging rights and glory.
All of these factors have also meant that Chess competitions in 2024 saw a rise of 16.84% in its yearly Hours Watched (HW) figures. The Peak Viewers (PV) numbers were slightly on the lower side — falling by 10.52% — with both entries for 2023 and last year coming from the FIDE World Championship series.
Importantly, with more tournaments introduced and most of them making it to livestreaming, the airtime shot up by almost 781 and a half hours. Among the top streamers to take the game to a broader audience were the aforementioned Nakamura, Anna Cramling, Levy "GothamChess" Rozman, and Sergey "Crestbook Шахматы" Shipov.
However, the average number of online viewers was much higher in 2023, signaling that events that year were able to retain audiences for longer at any moment than in 2024. Nevertheless, there's not much to divide what we saw across the last two years, with the increase in the number of tournaments being the main takeaway for the latter.
The top two events by watch time last year were also better than the corresponding top two from 2023. The FIDE Candidates Chess Tournaments 2024 also emerged as the sport's most-watched competition outside of world championships, led by the success of players from major markets like India and the USA.
What will come as a surprise to many (perhaps not so shocking to those following the game and the viewership of its events more closely) is that many Chess tournaments have performed much better than a few prominent esports offerings. For example, the game's top event by watch time, the 2024 FIDE World Championship, beat out top competitions from more popular esports titles like Rocket League (RLCS 2024 - World Championship), Rainbow Six (any event apart from the Six Invitational 2024), Call of Duty (any Call of Duty League entry from 2024), Free Fire (Free Fire World Series - Global Finals 2024), and Apex Legends (ALGS: 2024 Split 1 Playoffs).
It's an interesting time to be a chess fan, with a lot of moving pieces involving its players and organizers and the game itself moving toward becoming a more spectator- and livestreaming-friendly product. What this means for the futures of superstars like Nakamura and World No 1 Magnus Carlsen, who has also stated that he won't be as active on the professional circuit as before, remains to be seen.
