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With 27 Million Watching, Video Game Championship Rivals World Series Ratings

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) - Video game leagues are becoming as popular as top sporting events.

MarketWatch reports that Riot Games 2014 "League of Legends" world championship has 27-million streaming views, topping the average viewership for individual World Series games, and matching the viewership for March Madness.

Video game streamer Twitch, based in San Francisco and owned by Amazon, has more than 100-million viewers per month, with the average user spending at least two hours a day on the site.

ESL is the largest eSports broadcasting company and it plans to fill stadiums around the world for its events, having packed more than 100-thousand fans in its four-day world championship event in Poland in March.

The video game industry overall is showing solid growth thanks to strong sales of the Xbox One and Playstation 4, and Electronic Arts and Take Two each received analyst upgrades this week based on their positioning to take advantage of further growth.

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