The GeoGuessr community is becoming seriously competitive, and drawing serious viewership. The “where in the world are you?” video game launched its first-ever World Cup in 2023, and just completed its second global competition with a peak of 254,918 concurrent viewers–more than triple the first Cup’s viewership.
Why the spike in interest? We attribute it to creators like Rainbolt, whose stellar location-guessing skills have helped introduce GeoGuessr to a new, esports-hungry audience online.
GeoGuessr came out in 2013, and its concept it simple: When a player opens the game, it drops them in a random location on Google Street View. The goal is to figure out where they are, as precisely as they can, in as little time as possible.
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For us normies, that can be quite a challenge, and will probably involve lots of traversing the local streets and/or terrain, desperately squinting for a glimpse of anything identifiable. But people like Rainbolt–who’s grown his YouTube channel to over 1.6 million subscribers and hit nearly 80 million monthly views earlier this year by uploading videos of himself making lightning-fast, extremely accurate guesses–have honed this skill to an almost supernatural sharpness.
Rainbolt often guesses within just a few miles of the actual location, and can almost always identify the country he’s in by things like color of road paint, types of materials used in buildings, and crops growing nearby. He also (along with a team of similarly skilled friends) helps followers find locations from beloved photos of their family members.
Rainbolt isn’t the only GeoGuessr creator out there, nor the only high-level player, but he’s become one of the most prominent faces of the game, making headlines with some of his viral content. He’s helped push GeoGuessr to new heights, with more and more people looking up the game, and more and more people playing. GeoGuessr‘s developers say interest in playing the game “continues to grow strongly, and we recently passed over 60 million registered players in more than 140 countries.”
A small handful of those 60 million players recently gathered in Stockholm, Sweden, for GeoGuessr‘s second World Cup, which offered a total $100,000 prize pool–and, according to Dexerto, any revenue from Twitch subs to the official GeoGuessr channel during the event being split between competitors, too. Several of the finalists, like French pro Blinky, Spanish pro Topotic, and Brazilian pro Orlando, are content creators who post videos of their speedruns or livestream their guesses, contributing to the rise of GeoGuessr content across YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch.
The Cup started with 24 players and whittled them down to two finalists—Blinky and American competitor mk. Blinky, who came second in GeoGuessr‘s first Cup, ended up clinching for first this year. His prize was $50,000, a big jump from last year’s first-place winner’s prize of $16K. That figure increase shows just how much the World Cup, and GeoGuessr‘s overall competitive scene, has grown in one year. (Also worth noting: Blinky regularly competes in Rainbolt’s own GeoGuessr events; pros embracing these community events have also helped draw in a bigger audience for the game.)
GeoGuessr’s first World Cup nabbed peak viewership of around 71,000 people. Like we mentioned above, this year’s event topped out at over a quarter million, and it also brought GeoGuessr‘s official Twitch channel 258,457 hours of watch time from Sept. 11-14, according to data from Streams Charts.
With all this being said, we think GeoGuessr is a new face to watch on the esports scene, and while it won’t be pulling in Apex Legends or Overwatch League money or viewership (at least not for now…), it’s a game that’s found a growing, enthusiastic playerbase and viewership, thanks in part to the creators who show their skills on social media.
