BLAST Premier World Final 2022, the last large-scale CS:GO tournament of 2022, ended in Abu Dhabi on December 18. Esports Charts will tell you which team and broadcast language drew the most viewers, and what impact the World Cup had on the tournament's statistics. Unfortunately, the 2022 World Final was the least popular BLAST series LAN final of 2022.
First, the participants competed against each other in the Group Stage, after which the strongest teams advanced to the Playoffs. G2 Esports won the tournament defeating Team Liquid 2-0 in the Final. This was the team's first LAN Tournament victory in three years, which allowed G2 to move up nine spots in the HLTV.org chart and become the Top 3 strongest team in the world.
Viewership Statistics
BLAST Premier World Final 2022 matches accumulated 8.2 million Hours Watched and drew 162.4K Average Viewers. The event saw 378K Peak Viewers tuning in for the Grand Final between G2 Esports and Team Liquid.
Team Liquid became the most watched team, with its matches reaching 3.2 million Hours Watched. The winner of the tournament, G2 Esports, reached almost the same number. As for the Average Viewers number at the broadcasts, the matches of Natus Vincere attracted the most attention — more than 210K AV watched the games of the team.
English was the most popular broadcast language — it accounted for more than 60.6% of the HW total and drew 228.7K PV. Russian (18.9% of the HW total, 92K PV) and Portuguese (7.5% of the HW total, 29.2K) are also in the Top 3. When it comes to platforms, Twitch accounted for 75.1% of the HW total, and YouTube accounted for about 24% of the same metric. A small percentage of viewers also followed the tournament on Trovo, and TikTok.
The most viewers watched the tournament on the official BLAST Premier Twitch channel — it amassed 3.3 million HW and had 141.3K PV. The Russian-language channel bysl4m (58.9K PV) and the BLAST channel on YouTube (54.5K PV) are also in the Top 3.
Comparison with Other Tournaments
BLAST Premier World Final 2022 is the most unpopular tournament in the BLAST series in 2022 ( except for the Showdown regional qualifiers). It is twice as many behind BLAST Premier Spring 2022 Finals by Peak Viewer. The difference in Average Viewers number at matches is similar.
There are several reasons for this drop in metrics: first, Spring 2022 Finals was covered on NimoTV where the broadcasts in Vietnamese attracted more than 100K Peak Viewers. By comparison, the Abu Dhabi final had no streams on NimoTV, and the Vietnamese broadcast drew only 11.4K Peak Viewers.
Secondly, the "NAVI effect" worked during the spring tournament — fans from Eastern Europe came to watch the s1mple's team win, thanks to which the Russian-language broadcast reached 193K Peak Viewers. However, NAVI showed an unsuccessful result at the World Final 2022 and was eliminated in the first round of the Playoffs. That had an effect on the popularity of the Russian-language broadcast, which did not exceed 92K PV (in the Quarterfinals).
The third important reason was the low viewership at Gaules's streams. Usually the Brazilian streamer gathers hundreds of thousands of Portuguese-speaking CS:GO fans, but during BLAST Premier World Final 2022 he had only 25K PV. This can be attributed to the absence of Brazilian teams at the tournament, as well as bad timing — the two final days of the World Final 2022 coincided with the final matches of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
As for the audience reach, BLAST Premier World Final 2022 showed twice as many Peak Viewers as the 2021 Final — 378K vs. 727.3K. The situation is similar with the Average Viewers number on broadcast — 162K vs. 306K. At the same time, there was a lot of community casting during BLAST Premier World Final 2022. In total, nearly 70 channels on various platforms were involved in covering the tournament. Among the famous streamers were Gaules, Tarik, mOe_tv and others. For comparison, there were only 33 channels at BLAST Premier World Final 2021, but they attracted two times more viewers.
Don't forget to check out the results of the year provided by the Esports Charts editorial staff:
