Esports World Cup qualifiers reached 1M Hours Watched despite low official channel viewership
The inaugural edition of the Esports World Cup is coming this Summer 2024 and promises to be one of the largest esports gaming festivals ever held. Replacing last year’s Gamers8 festival, the Riyadh-based event will begin in July and will be esports’ largest event with over $60M allocated for the prize pool.
Last year’s Gamers8 held some of the largest events of the year, and the festival was a major success as part of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 plan. Esports will return to Riyadh this Summer for over 20 events spanning 19 individual disciplines. It will also introduce the new Club Championship: esports organizations are encouraged to submit teams to as many events across different disciplines as possible, as the most competitively successful organizations will win prizes as the EWC Club Champion.
A first taste of this year’s Esports World Cup, the regional qualifier events for their Counter-Strike 2 tournament, took place throughout mid-April. The qualifiers have already entranced tens of thousands of Counter-Strike fans from around the world, and the 11 closed and open regional qualifiers generated over 1.03M Hours Watched in total for EWC.
Although the events did break the 1M HW barrier, the viewership for the events was disappointing and largely fueled by popular co-streaming content creators. The official EWC broadcasts for the events received shockingly low viewership, excluding some events where the EWC broadcasts were essentially the only broadcast available.
Throughout 5 days of intense action, the EWC qualifiers generated a 7-figure Hours Watched sum, on top of 54.3K Peak Viewers for the EWC 2024 South American Closed Qualifier. The South American tournament, particularly its Portuguese-speaking audience, was critical for the overall viewership of these qualifier events, and Portuguese-speaking audiences alone received 52.4K concurrent viewers at peak.
These Portuguese viewers came largely from community casters, and community casters generated 95.7% of the total watch time generated by the South American Closed Qualifiers. Viewership for the official EWC broadcasting channels at this event was shockingly low, and this persisted in many regions around the globe.
Twitch was also much more favoured than YouTube for viewers of these events. The Asian and Oceanic tournaments received much smaller viewership than the South American and European events, and these Eastern audiences are usually preferential to YouTube-based broadcasts. The viewership distribution by platform reflects the heavily Western-sided viewership for Counter-Strike.
The Esports World Cup 2024 will feature 18 other games excluding Counter-Strike, and the event will have plenty of other opportunities to appeal to Eastern audiences and gather more attention on YouTube Live. Now, let’s take a look at the individual viewership of the top qualifiers by watch time and peak concurrent viewership.
Top Esports World Cup 2024 qualifiers by Hours Watched & Peak Viewers
As aforementioned, the South American events generated by far the most viewership for these regional events. This high viewership was almost entirely thanks to Gaules and his community of co-streams for these competitions. The Brazilian streamer generated over 50.5K concurrent viewers for his personal Twitch channel alone throughout the Closed Qualifier, contributing the vast majority of viewers to this tournament.
Although the more prestigious Closed Qualifier for South America received more viewership than the Open Qualifier, this was not true around the globe. The European tournaments stood out as the black sheep of the EWC tournaments; Europe was the only region where the Open Qualifier event received higher viewership than the Closed Qualifier.
The EWC 2024 European Open Qualifier received a significant chunk of its viewership thanks to Russian-language co-streamer Buster. The Twitch streamer received 28.7K Peak Viewers, more than the entire peak viewership accumulated by the European Closed Qualifier. The Closed Qualifier suffered from a lack of broadcasts and the decision not to allow community casters to cover the matches.
While the Open qualifier for Europe was broadcast by almost 100 channels, the closed qualifier was broadcast by only a 10th of this. The official EWC Twitch Channel generated 20.4K Peak Viewers for the closed qualifier, almost the entirety of the viewership of the event. This was the highest viewership enjoyed by the official EWC channel, enabled only by being the exclusive broadcaster for this event. If the tournament had allowed co-streams, the tournament would have reached a much higher audience at the expense of EWC’s monopoly on viewership.
The EWC 2024 North American Closed Qualifier suffered particularly from a lack of community casters, reaching only 10K PV. The EWC came under criticism particularly for missing some matches entirely, such as the Upper Bracket Semifinal between M80 and eLevate at the North American qualifier which was not broadcast by any channel. This problem persisted around the globe, with many first stage playoffs matches being ignored entirely.
The shortcomings of the event organization resulted in abnormally low viewership for this event, and antagonized North American fans of Counter-Strike looking to watch some of the best teams of their region compete for qualification.
Earlier this year, IEM Dallas held its qualifier events for many of the same regions as the EWC. Compared directly to the EWC, the Intel Extreme Masters Dallas series garnered far more viewership than the EWC. The IEM Dallas series offers only $250K, paling in comparison to the upcoming EWC, but the event series is more established in Counter-Strike and the organizers did a better job at covering the qualifiers.
The Dallas qualifiers benefited from a strong presence of both community casters and official broadcasters, mixing together to reach the largest possible audience for these esports events. Both the South American and European IEM Dallas 2024 qualifiers received over 100K Peak Viewers, far outperforming the respective EWC qualifiers.
In all regions across the globe, the Intel Extreme Masters Dallas qualifiers received a significantly higher viewership than their EWC counterparts. The viewership discrepancy was most extreme for the European qualifiers, where the IEM Dallas qualifier received a peak viewership 408% higher than the EWC qualifier.
The upcoming EWC 2024 events may be some of the most popular esports events of the Summer, and with such a large financial backing behind them, the esports professionals in attendance will be highly motivated to perform strongly at the events. Esports Charts will cover the EWC for its inaugural edition this Summer, tracking viewership data for all tournaments making up the $60M prize pool.
