OTK Apex Invitational — Do creators keep Apex Legends’ popularity up?

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Before the Apex Legends Global Series returned in 2022, the gaming organisation OTK Network hosted an Apex Legends tournament which ended up being one of the biggest Apex Legends events held to date. 

The OTK Apex Invitational, which took place online on January 14th, featured 20 teams combined of professional athletes and prominent content creators fighting for their share of the $50,000 prize pool. Each team played 6 games and earned a reward ranging from $600 to $15,000 based on final placement. 

Among the invited participants were streamers Nicholas “NICKMERCS” Kolcheff, Dennis “Cloakzy” Lepore and Shivam "ShivFPS" Patel, the Apex player for TSM Phillip “ImperialHal” Dosen, as well as the Eric “Snip3down” Wrona, who recently left the competitive Apex Legends scene to play Halo on the FaZe Clan roster.

OTK Apex Invitational viewership results

Thanks to the participation of 60 known Apex players and streamers, who also broadcasted the competition on their own respective Twitch channels, the event has reached a peak of 191.1K concurrent viewers, becoming the seventh most popular Apex Legends event (by PV). In 4 hours of Air Time, the event accumulated over 679K Hours Watched. 

On average,166.3K viewers tuned in to spectate the competition, which concluded with a victory of the Team Snip3down. The winning team consisted of its captain Snip3down and streamers Rambrro and Renegade.

When it comes to the most successful broadcasts of the event, the leader by both Peak Viewers and Hours Watched was NICKMERCS, whose stream attracted 47K Peak Viewers and garnered 150K Hours Watched. 

The second top streamer of the event by both metrics was ImperialHal, who accumulated 27K Peak Viewers and 80K Hours Watched. The third place is occupied by iiTzTimmy with 18.3K Peak Viewers and nmplol with 53.7K Hours Watched. 

Given that 40 out of 60 competitors were from the US, the majority — 95.4% — of the total Hours Watched was brought in by English-speaking viewers. The second most prevalent language among the event’s spectators was German, which accounted for 3.2% of the total HW. 

Out of the three German-speaking participants, the biggest contributor to the tournament's viewership was ungespielt, whose broadcast garnered 22.5K Hours Watched. 

The success of Apex streamer events 

Just like in the case of OTK Apex Invitational, it is not rare for streamer tournaments to reach viewership numbers comparable with official esports circuits. Particularly competitive Apex Legends has seen similar development in December 2021, when the Samsung-hosted  Samsung Odyssey Invitational became the most-watched Apex Legends event of the month, surpassing the best-performing ALGS event by 8K Peak Viewers.  

Compared to this streamer tournament, OTK Apex Invitational attracted 13.75% more concurrent viewers and 9.92% more Average Viewers. 

The favourable viewership results of both of these events indicate the great potential of Apex Legends events with content creators as competitors, which is confirmed by the fact that the title remains in the Top 10 of most popular categories on Twitch (by HW). Based on these results, we might see more such events being held in the near future. 

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