In the previous article on the three latest majors, we've compared their respective first stages – with the FACEIT Major showing the best overall figures. Now it is the turn of the second stage of the CS:GO World Championship – the Legends Stage.
This time we will not concentrate that much on the reasons behind the results shown by the championships. While IEM Katowice does have a number of drawbacks, we have already mentioned these in the previous article available at the following link.
The second stage of the last World Championship has repeated its predecessor's failures. Namely, at the Polish championship, the "legends" have failed to live up to the viewcount standards set by the London Major, as well as to those set by the Boston event.
The average number of viewers for the Intel Extreme Masters Katowice was equal to 404 thousand – whereas the matches in UK and US have reached the respective figures of 429 and 414 thousand viewers.
It is important to remind that our comparison does not account for the Chinese broadcasts, given that the corresponding venues fail to provide any precise means for tracking the amount of viewers.
Peak figures-wise, IEM seems to be a far cry from what the organizer would have liked to obtain, its most popular match having managed to gather only 626 thousand viewers. To compare, FACEIT has peaked at 753 thousand viewers, while the Boston event's streams have managed to reach 679 thousand spectators during their peak moments.
The Portuguese stream has surprised us once again, peaking at 132 thousand viewers at Katowice Major – which is 4 thousand more than in the UK. Such a result was greatly influenced by gAuLeS, who was using his personal channel to broadcast the MiBR matches. Looks like the Brazilian fans are quite eager when it comes to supporting their teams.
Neither the modified format of the event nor the newly introduced ranking system that optimized the pairing process have managed to help the competition in Katowice. The new procedure of issuing the capsule drops during the broadcasts certainly didn't bring the shooter more popularity. It may well be that from the Valve's standpoint, the financial gains simply take priority over any gains in popularity.
Overall, compared to the popularity of other events, we can't say that the Poland event falls behind in a completely hopeless fashion – but the problem in still noticeable. The game's perspectives, therefore, do not look that bright, and that's considering the fact that CS:GO has recently become free-to-play – which should've resulted in the increase rather than decrease of gamers' interest.
