ESL Pro League Season 17 Group A viewership — G2 Esports outperforms Cloud9 and Fnatic by the audience
The first matches of ESL Pro League Season 17 (CS:GO) kicked off on February 22. Group A teams, including G2 Esports, Cloud9, Fnatic, and others, started the fight for the title and a $850K prize pool. Esports Charts has recapped the results of group A and calculated the number of viewers at the matches.
An ESL Pro League Season 17 format is slightly different from previous seasons. In the current tournament, there are 32 teams, not 24, as it was before. As a result, there are now eight teams in each group (instead of six previously), and 4 teams, instead of 3, qualify for the playoffs.
The format of the groups is another interesting innovation. Teams no longer have to play a round-robin series. Instead, they have a triple-elimination bracket where they can lose as many as twice and still make it to the playoffs. The best teams in each group advance to the quarterfinals, while the rest of the teams start the playoffs with earlier rounds.
ESL Pro League Season 17 Viewership Statistics
Cloud9 became the best team in Group A. Outsiders, G2 Esports and Fnatic took three more quota places. Evil Geniuses, MIBR, Eternal Fire, and IHC Esports dropped out of the playoffs. Overall, the group did not have any unexpected results, except for the fact that G2 Esports got to the lower bracket pretty early, in the second round.
Viewership Statistics
ESL Pro League Season 17 Group A viewership statistics
Group A matches accumulated 5.3 million Hours Watched and drew 108.7K Average Viewers. The game between G2 Esports and Cloud9 became the most popular match in the group, being the only one with more than 200K Peak Viewers.
Fnatic became the leader by total Hours Watched, as it played the most matches in the group because of the format. As for the Average Viewers number at the matches, G2 Esports surpassed the other teams by nearly 30K AV more than the nearest pursuer. We should remind you that G2 Esports is one of the main favorites in this tournament — the team just recently won BLAST Premier: World Final 2022 and IEM Katowice 2023, totalling $900K at these two CS:GO tournaments.
English became the most popular language by Peak Viewers and Hours Watched during the Group A matches. Portuguese and Russian also made it into the Top 3, but they combined accumulated fewer than the leader by both metrics.
Twitch retained the leadership among the platforms: the Peak Viewers number on its channels was 3.6 times higher than on YouTube. We remind you that ESL has recently resumed official broadcasts on YouTube after a two-year exclusive agreement with Twitch.
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ESL Pro League Season 17 Group B matches are scheduled for March 1-5, where Heroic, MOUZ, BIG and other teams will fight to qualify for the playoffs. Imperial Esports and FURIA Esports will also play here, which means we can expect an increase in the number of viewers on the Portuguese-language broadcasts: let's see how many viewers Gaules will attract this time.
