The Esports World Cup’s record global reach put competitive gaming on a bigger stage. For MENA’s next generation, the route into that world still runs through livestreams, community tournaments and creator-led watch parties.
The 2026 Esports World Cup closed with the kind of numbers that make esports feel truly global.
Across seven weeks in Paris, the event brought together more than 2,000 players, 200 clubs and 25 tournaments, with a $75 million prize pool. Organisers reported 850 million viewers, 440 million hours watched, 175,000 competition tickets and 2 million visits across venues, Fan Fest and city activations. Those figures show the ceiling. The more interesting question for MENA is how people reach it.
The organisers’ closing report also said more than 1.5 million players competed through 330 Road to EWC events during the wider season.
Bigo Live’s role at EWC 2026 offers one answer. As an official content partner for MENA, the platform brought tournament streams, creator-led watch parties, interactive viewing and in-app rewards to regional communities.
Its activation focused on mobile titles with a strong regional following, including Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile. Across the tournament restreaming programme, Bigo Live recorded a total audience of 1,306,254 and 2,546,420 views. Supporting social content reached 3.5 million people and generated 6.25 million views. The partnership mattered because it placed MENA creators and fans inside the conversation around a global event, with their own rooms, languages and communities.
That connection between global spectacle and local participation is where the region’s talent pipeline becomes visible. Saudi Arabia’s National Gaming and Esports Strategy has set a 2030 ambition of SAR 50 billion ($13.3 billion) in GDP contribution and nearly 39,000 jobs, according to a 2024 PwC Middle East analysis with the Saudi Esports Federation. Reaching that scale depends on people who can play, commentate, manage teams, organise communities and produce content.
For a human view of that pathway, look at Restart, an Egyptian gaming creator whose career has moved from livestreaming and commentary into team leadership. In a 2025 report, Bigo Live described Restart’s commentary during an EWC 2024 Mobile Legends: Bang Bang women’s-tournament watch party as generating more than 1,000 viewer watch-hours in a single session. The report also identified him as manager of Team Ultra Legends.
“Over five years on Bigo Live, I’ve grown tremendously – both as a gamer and a commentator,” said Restart in a 2025 report on Bigo Live and EWC. “The platform gave me the space to evolve, compete, and eventually lead a professional team at EWC.”
Rimas, known on Bigo Live as rimesrimo, shows the creator pathway around the tournament. A 31-year-old Tunisian-French architect who has lived in France for more than a decade, she came across Bigo Live by chance around eight years ago and found in it a way to stay connected with Arab culture and other Arabs while living abroad. Her live community, BR Stars, has remained active for nearly seven years, and she has since launched her own broadcaster agency.
Rimas holds a Master’s degree in Design and is preparing to begin PhD studies at Sorbonne University in Paris. Her attendance at EWC 2026 gave her community a creator’s view of a global esports moment, while her wider journey shows how livestreaming can help Arab creators build networks, skills and income alongside professional and academic ambitions. The minor leagues live inside the community
Restart’s story gives the MENA talent conversation a useful human scale. A player gains confidence on stream, a creator becomes a commentator, and a public identity develops into the trust and leadership a professional team needs. The process is less about one breakthrough moment and more about repeated opportunities to perform, learn and be seen.
Bigo Live’s Bigo Open Championship, or BOC, provides a clear example. A March 2025 article by Bigo Technology director Ian Goh described the sixth BOC edition as involving more than 2,000 MENA gaming creators, 5,000 players and 1,000 teams across Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and Free Fire. The article characterised the competition as a training ground for teams pursuing international qualifiers.
That scale matters because recurring tournaments create a learning environment. Players learn to prepare under time pressure, adjust after defeat, communicate with teammates and perform in front of an audience. Creators develop a parallel skill set: pacing a broadcast, discussing strategy, moderating a community and turning a match into a story viewers want to follow.
Livestreaming adds the social layer around competition. It gives a talented player a route to visibility before a scout, organisation or sponsor has heard their name. It also lets communities form around Arabic-language commentary and shared games. Every match produces reactions, questions and a public record of how a creator or player performs under pressure.
Bigo Live described its approach in a 2025 MENA partnership update as a blend of crossover leagues, offline community events and gamified tournaments. It also reported a 19.05% month-on-month rise in new gaming users, a company figure that reflects audiences’ appetite for conversation, shared viewing and community play.
From a watch party to a professional room
Mobile Legends shows how that ecosystem works in practice. A report on Bigo Live’s M6 partnership said Restart and fellow creator Stoned hosted an M6 Grand Final watch party, while Bigo’s BOC maintained a regular cycle of tournament opportunities for regional players and teams. A creator who begins by reacting to a professional game can develop into a credible analyst. A player who joins a community bracket can progress to a team with regular practice. Strong regional results can carry that team towards larger qualifiers.
Bigo Mobile Masters sits between home streaming and international events. In previous reporting, Bigo Live described Bigo Mobile Masters and its all-women Bigo Mobile Valkyries competition as stepping stones for aspiring competitive players. Bigo Live’s 2026 MENA activation showed how platforms can bring that scale closer to home. The enduring story lives in community tournaments, watch-party rooms and creator channels, where the next player, manager or on-air voice earns the chance to step up.
