How to Watch eSports on Twitch

After a massive rise in popularity, the global esports market is currently valued at just under one billion U.S. dollars. The influence of games like League of Legends and Overwatch and their competitive torment scenes continue to push that value upwards, with revenues expected to reach 1.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.

One of the primary reasons that esports have become so successful is the ease with which fans can access esports content, and the major contributor to this is the streaming platform Twitch.

Twitch has also given an enormous range of streamers the opportunity to turn their passions into a successful career on the world’s premier live-streaming platform.

Esports on Twitch isn’t restricted to just League of Legends and Overwatch, however. Given the rising popularity of digital sports alternatives, large sporting franchises are also making the move online.

Besides League of Legends, you can watch the new F1 Virtual Grand Prix series, watch football stars like Mesut Ozil play Fortnite, or even check out poker pros at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Tournament before heading over to some of the best visa casinos to test your own skills.

So, if you’re interested in esports and want to know how you can get more of that content on Twitch, we’ve written up a short guide for you.

Getting Your Account

The first thing you must do is set yourself up with a Twitch account. The good news is that a basic Twitch account is free, although it’s ad-supported, so your viewing will be broken up by advertising. 

Twitch Prime is a premium account option, which does cost but comes with benefits such as not having any ads, allowing you to subscribe to channels to see all their updates. Plus, it gives you access to video on demand to watch streams you’d otherwise have missed. 

If you happen to already have an Amazon Prime account, good news, you’ll be able to use that account to subscribe to one channel per month for no extra cost. You only need to be located in a country where the service is available. But even if that’s not the case, you can always use a VPN to get access to your favorite streams.

Watching Your Favorite Games

Now that you’ve got your account, you’ll be ready to watch live streams of your favorite games, and finding stuff on Twitch couldn’t be easier. All you need to do is navigate to the ‘browse’ tab, and you’ll be given a list of all the games being streamed on Twitch at any given time.  

You won’t be short on choice either, as there are around 43,553 channels on Twitch dedicated to steaming esports content.

Getting Your Streaming Resolution Set Up

Now you’ve found a game you want to watch, the last thing you want is for it to be all juddery or stopping every few minutes to buffer. Thankfully, there is a range of options available to you to fine-tune your streaming experience.

In the bottom right corner of your screen, you’ll see a little gear icon. This icon will bring up your streaming options menu. To get your stream to run correctly, you’ll need to set the stream’s resolution to match your machine and internet connection.

If you have a fantastic connection speed and a great rig, then you can set your resolution to 4K, if the stream supports it. However, not everyone has that kind of setup, and not having a premium rig won’t stop you from watching esports.

You can set your steam quality to ‘auto,’ and Twitch will try to find the best streaming quality for your setup. You can also manually set the resolution to fine-tune it.

Switch to Fullscreen Mode for Best Viewing

Now that your stream is running well, you might find the Twitch surround it getting a little restrictive. If you’re not getting social in Twitch chat, you can always switch your browser into Theater Mode, which will increase the stream size and remove the chat bar. You’ll see the theater mode icon in the bottom left corner of the screen.

If you want to blank everything out and just have your stream front and center, then you have the option to switch to Full-Screen mode. This removes everything except for what you’re streaming, giving you a distraction-free experience.