Unpacking Nuance Among Esports Consumers: Market Partitions Within Esports Based on Social Media Analytics

Esports audiences appear to be highly specialized, with consumers tending to follow individual titles rather than the broader competitive gaming landscape. Drawing on Twitter follower data from 16 esports title accounts, encompassing more than 33 million unique followers, this study examines how audiences are shared across games. Its central finding is that 81% of followers follow only one title, and that audience overlap is shaped far more by publisher affiliation and development history than by genre. Titles from the same publisher show the strongest audience overlap, with Blizzard's Hearthstone, StarCraft, and Overwatch displaying the highest shared-audience patterns, led by a lift of 15.94 between Hearthstone and StarCraft.

The analysis measures overlap using lift, which captures shared audiences beyond what audience sizes alone would predict. Larger titles such as Fortnite and FIFA exhibit high exclusivity, and exclusivity correlates strongly with audience size (r = .71). Sport simulation games show comparatively little crossover with non-sport titles, yet traditional genre categories otherwise offer little explanatory power for how audiences segment. Data collection covers a November to December 2020 snapshot, and the authors acknowledge that Twitter's user base is not fully representative of esports consumers more broadly.

Taken together, the findings suggest that consumers select games for the appeal of individual titles and their publishers rather than for stylistic or gameplay similarity. The authors attribute high exclusivity, particularly among the most popular games, to the substantial time required to master complex mechanics and tactics, reflecting strong specialization. Practically, the results imply that poaching players from similar games may be an ineffective marketing strategy, while cross-promotion within a publisher's portfolio may offer a more effective route to audience growth. The study reports no external funding or conflicts of interest.