ALGS: 2023 Championship Day 1 loses watch time compared to 2022 despite the new format with longer airtime

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The ultimate tournament of the Apex Legends Global Series is here. The ALGS 2023 Championship will run from the 6th to the 10th of September, starting off with a Group Stage, before proceeding to a Bracket Stage which will decide the twenty teams to compete in the Finals for a chunk of the $2M USD prize pool.

Earlier this year the ALGS switched to a new format that would see all matches take place within their own timeslot, instead of Group Stage matches taking place simultaneously. With the help of this change, the 2023 Split 2 Playoffs managed to break the 10M Hours Watched mark and become the second-most-watched event in ALGS history, just behind the 2022 Championship. 

Based on this and the other data for the 2023 season, we predicted the championship may be the most-watched event in ALGS history. Despite the previous 2023 ALGS events becoming the most-watched of their kind, Day 1 of the Championship is off to a rough start for the event as viewership is on a downturn compared to the previous edition.

ALGS: 2023 Champions Day 1 Viewership  Day 1 viewership of the ALGS 2023 Championship compared to 2022 event  

All in all, the first day of the ALGS 2023 Championship is off to a disappointing start. The event received just below 2.3M hours of watch time with a peak concurrent viewership of 222K fans tuning in for the final round of the Group C and D match-up. 

The new format of all matches being covered in their own timeslot meant that the Hours Watched figure was boosted through the extra airtime, but this didn’t prevent a 12.8% dip compared to last year. Day 1 of the 2022 event was live for over 10 hours, but its 2023 counterpart managed to broadcast for over 13 hours on the first day, a long day for any esports professional, whether competing or working on the broadcast. Other metrics such as Peak Viewers and Average Viewers, which weren’t as heavily affected by the format change, saw an even larger drop: with PV dropping by 39.2% and AV by 33.4%. 

Of particular interest, Japanese viewership dropped 34.1% in PV compared to last year, despite even more Japanese players attending the event compared to last year.  It is too early in the event to say for sure, but this might have something to do with Crazy Raccoon, a Korean-Japanese fan-favourite organisation, not competing in this year’s Championship event.

Chinese viewership for the event was the only major language for the event that didn’t experience a drop in viewership for 2023. Chinese-language viewership is something you don’t normally see on Twitch, and in this case, it was brought by streamer restiafps. Restiafps, also known in the Apex scene as Restya, is a retired Taiwanese professional esports player, who competed as both a coach and player in Overwatch and as an Apex Legends professional. His broadcasts of the ALGS are one of the rare instances of a Chinese-language-based community casting stream on Twitch and he was responsible for a majority of the Chinese viewership for the event.

In summary, the first day of the ALGS: 2023 Championship kicked off to low viewership all around. 2023 was shaping up to be an exciting year for ALGS, with tournaments throughout the year setting records and achieving new viewership highs. Sadly, the first day of the ultimate event of the year for the discipline failed to live up to the hype. Nevertheless, the event still has a while to go, and viewership may rise as the event enters the Bracket and Finals stages. Check out the tournament page of the event for more details on the viewership for the event so far.