BLAST Open Spring received some of the highest opening viewership of any CS2 event in 2025

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The BLAST Open Spring 2025 is the first-of-its-kind in the revamped BLAST Premier system for 2025 and onwards. At the inaugural event, the first round of matches recorded some of BLAST Premier’s strongest opening peak viewership ever, thanks to passionate regional audiences and cross-region match-ups. Replacing the former seasonal Groups, Showdown, Final event series, the new BLAST Open event is poised to become one of 2025’s most popular Counter-Strike tournaments. 

Between March 19–24, 16 of the world’s best Counter-Strike teams fight their way through the BLAST Open Spring 2025’s Group Stage bracket. While BLAST Premier events do not offer the same million-dollar prize pools as other CS2 series, they’ve still recorded some of the strongest Counter-Strike viewership results for 2025. The BLAST Premier Bounty Season 1 offered a half-million in prizes, yet became one of the most popular BLAST events ever at almost 700,000 PV.

The most popular match of the first round at the BLAST Open Spring 2025 was NAVI’s game against FURIA. It’s unsurprising this match would be so popular: the Ukrainian squad is one of Counter-Strike’s most popular teams globally, and FURIA enjoy a sizable following of loyal Brazilian viewers. Together, they were able to push viewership substantially higher than any other game. 

Aside from this top match, no other game was able to break 300,000 concurrent viewers during the first round — but some came close. Team Liquid’s match against Eternal Fire in Group B fell just shy of 300,000 PV, coming out slightly ahead of G2 Esports’ game against Imperial. As the highest-ranked North American team in attendance at the Open, Team Liquid enjoyed substantial support from English-speaking viewers during their match.

Generally, Group B matches were more popular than Group A, but only slightly. Aside from Team Spirit’s game against The Huns Esports, all Group A matches received over 270,000 Peak Viewers. Group B enjoyed just a slight edge from more effectively combining regional audiences, with a strong Brazilian presence, and fan-favorite squads like G2 Esports and NAVI. 

The opening round of the BLAST Open Spring enjoyed stable viewership for most of its matches. While there were a couple outliers on either end, most games were watched by at least a quarter-of-a-million viewers. The stable viewership results of the first round are a promising sign for the Open’s overall result, with many Counter-Strike fans across the globe avidly following the tournament. 

The BLAST Open Spring 2025 has so far recorded a much stronger opening than the inaugural BLAST Premier Bounty earlier this year, which went on to become one of the series’ most popular tournaments ever. Building on BLAST’s recent successes in late 2024 and the start of this year, the new BLAST Open series could push viewership even higher for the organizer. 

A diverse source of viewership across various audiences was key for the first days of the Open. Across all of Counter-Strike’s major language demographics, both official broadcasts and co-streamers enjoyed high viewership throughout these games. Brazil’s Alexandre “Gaules” Borba was a step ahead of the other co-streamers, with over 100K Peak Viewers across his YouTube and Twitch livestreams.

Many co-streamers in all corners of esports are leveraging multistreaming to their advantage. By streaming to multiple platforms, streamers like Gaules can appeal to a wider variety of total potential viewers, and make the most use of his time covering games. With Kick now expanding rapidly into the esports scene, Gaules may consider multistreaming his esports broadcasts to Kick, too. 

Mark “ohnePixel” Zimmermann and Dmitrii “Recrent” Osintsev were the most popular streamers aside from Gaules. These two were the leading English-speaking and Russian-language streamers of the event, with ohnePixel far, far ahead of any other English-language co-streamer. The Russian-speaking side of co-streaming was a bit more competitive, with Roman “mokrivskyi” Mokrivsky also receiving over 30,000 PV.

As we head into the elimination matches of the Open, viewership could continue to rise, especially for the Brazilian teams. After FURIA and Imperial lost their first matches, both teams are now facing a North American squad in the lower-bracket. With elimination on the line, expect high viewership from both sides of the Americas for these games. Some of the later stage Group A matches may also be popular, as the likes of Team Spirit clashes with MOUZ, and potentially Team Vitality for the Upper Bracket Final. 

The Group Stage of the BLAST Spring Open continues this weekend, with the playoffs scheduled for March 28–29 in the MEO Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. Keep an eye on the viewership results of BLAST’s newest event series with the power of the Esports Charts viewership database; the BLAST Spring Open 2025 could be one of the most popular CS2 tournaments of the year.