Over 2 million tune in to watch IEM Cologne 2013

This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

The Intel Extreme Masters Season 8 event in Cologne marked the first international League of Legends competition since the end of the Season 3 World Championships. 2,122,820 viewers tuned in to watch American teams Cloud 9 and Counter Logic Gaming square off against European powerhouses Fnatic and Gambit Gaming in highly anticipated cross-Atlantic games. The official Twitch English stream hit a peak of just under 300,000 viewers on finals day, with the United States, Germany, Poland, France, and Sweden as the five countries who tuned in the most.

The Electronic Sports League has provided onGamers a breakdown of the source of viewership for IEM Cologne including Twitch and Asian steams, total unique viewers, total views/sessions, and peak concurrent viewers. ESL aims to bring transparency to live streaming statistics that are released by leagues and developers after large scale events.

"Openness and transparency are a key on the road of broad acceptance of eSport," ESL CEO and Founder Ralf Reichert told onGamers. "The community, press, sponsors, publishers and public deserve to know what's going on. Based on that we heavily support onGamers approach to bring light into a complicated dark jungle."

"I honestly can't judge what other people do but right now I think most release true data. With esport gaining importance the tendency and risk to fix stats gets higher. I don't see compelling reasons why not every other league would follow suit."

Reichert's statements and ESL's release of the information comes after Reichert and DreamHack CEO Robert Ohlén each tweeted that they would provide a breakdown of live streaming event statistics if asked.

In an interview at DreamHack Winter, Ohlén told onGamers what's important for them.

"When we present our numbers, it's unique's, the amount of hours viewed, that's the important stuff. It's not important for how many people push F5 on their computer."

When asked if DreamHack will present source numbers for their events, Ohlén stated that they will, under certain circumstances.

"We're not going to take a screenshot of an XL sheet. We'll make a deck. We are allowed to do whatever we want to [with our numbers], if we're allowed to by our NDA's and agreements. Yes we will present all the metrics as far as we know them...Trust us, we're Swedish."

Twitch Streams
Total	Total Views/Sessions	Unique Viewers	Peak Concurrent Viewers
November 23, 2013	2,776,060	1,208,260	194,212
November 24, 2013	3,904,600	1,462,580	302,851
Total	6,680,660	302,851
Total English Stream	6,274,700	2,122,820	285,246

Total Streams
	Total Views/Sessions	Unique Viewers	Peak Concurrent Viewers
November 23, 2013	2,776,060	1,208,260	217,671
November 24, 2013	3,904,600	1,462,580	338,625
Total	6,680,660	338,625

Numbers for the Asian streams were not available at this time. ESL says that although the event was held in Cologne, Germany, seeing the United States as the country who tuned in the most should be expected.

"If you compare the populations of countries it's not that surprising", says ESL's James Lampkin. "The US is about 315 million people - Germany is about 80. The broadcast was fairly friendly to US timezones so its not that surprising. People regularly compare all of Europe (50 countries) to NA (3 countries) which is a bit of a mistake. We don't focus too heavily on which county ranks #1 as the top 5-10 viewership countries tend to stay the same."

Country	Total Views/Sessions	% of Views are Unique Viewers
United States	1,084,260	17.28
Germany	868,680	13.84
Poland	375,840	5.99
France	367,760	5.86
Sweden	332,000	5.29
United Kingdom	314,820	5.02
Canada	278,160	4.43
Brazil	249,200	3.97
Spain	231,300	3.69
Netherlands	203,940	3.25
Russian Federation	191,700	3.06
Turkey	179,940	2.87
Denmark	179,060	2.85
Portugal	154,640	2.46
Greece	128,860	2.05
Czech Republic	128,740	2.05
Norway	127,740	2.04
Taiwan, Province of China	116,960	1.86
Belgium	113,180	1.80
Australia	112,160	1.79
Finland	106,880	1.70
Austria	79,340	1.26
Italy	76,240	1.22
Hong Kong	71,300	1.14
Hungary	70,480	1.12

onGamers has requested a breakdown of statistics from Major League Gaming, DreamHack, the Electronic Sports League, Redbull Esports, Riot Games and Blizzard for their recent major events. MLG declined at this time to provide numbers for the Columbus Championships. "Directionally we're trying to get away from trumpeting viewership stats as it really does not matter", said Adam Apicella, EVP of MLG Properties, in a recent Reddit thread. "We had a lot of people watch great content and hope to continue providing premium content."

Riot Games declined at this time to provide a breakdown for their record-breaking 32 million viewed Season 3 World Championships. DreamHack says that they will be released, but that they need time to gather the data. Red Bull Esports and Blizzard were not available for comment at the time of this posting.

Image Credit: ESL