BLAST Premier Fall 2022 Finals — fewer viewers from Spring 2022 Finals

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BLAST Premier Fall 2022 Finals, a CS:GO tournament, ended in Denmark on November 27. The Esports Charts editorial staff calculated the number of viewers who watched the Fall Finals series. Spoiler: far fewer from the Spring Finals series.

BLAST Premier Fall 2022 Finals was the penultimate season tournament to determine the eighth participant in BLAST Premier World Final 2022. The competition featured OG, Natus Vincere, Team Liquid, FaZe Clan, G2 Esports, Ninjas in Pyjamas, Heroic and Fluxo. At the Royal Arena in Copenhagen, they played for a prize pool of $425K.

Tournament Results

The Fall 2022 Finals participants were divided into two groups of four teams each — there  the playoff seeding and the first eliminated teams determined (these were OG and Fluxo teams). Heroic, the silver medalist in the Rio Major, was the strongest team in the playoffs. On their way to the finals the team defeated G2 Esports and Team Liquid, and in the final beat FaZe Clan. Remarkably, all matches ended with a score of 2-1. 

Heroic’s victory at BLAST Premier Fall 2022 Finals was Casper 'CadiaN' Møller's team's first success at a major international LAN tournament. His team will now compete in BLAST Premier World Final 2022, the final championship of the year.

Viewership Statistics 

Fall 2022 Finals matches totaled just over 8 million Hours Watched, and an Average Viewers number was 153.6K. A Peak Viewers number was 421.7K — this number was recorded at the Grand Final match between FaZe Clan and Heroic. It is noteworthy that the second most popular match gathered almost 100K Peak Viewers fewer — it was the quarterfinal between NiP and Natus Vincere. The concurrent viewership at the other games was even lower, not exceeding 270K people.

Natus Vincere became the leader by AV — 198K people. At the same time, Heroic retained the leadership by HW — 3.3 million. It should be mentioned that the Danish team played 14 maps at the tournament, more than any other participant of the event.

English became the most popular language of broadcasts — it accounted for 64,8% of the total HW. Russian (14.4%) and Portuguese (9.8%) are also in the Top 3. As for the distribution by platform, Twitch accounted for 80% of the total HW, while YouTube accounted for the rest.

Comparison with Other Tournaments

Comparison with Other Tournaments

BLAST Premier Fall 2022 Finals proved to be less popular than BLAST Premier Spring 2022 Finals. The Fall tournament lagged behind the Spring tournament by all major metrics: HW (-31%), AV (-46%), and PV (-44%).

There are several reasons for this large gap. First of all, Natus Vincere's performance at BLAST Premier Fall 2022 Finals was not the best — one of the most mediatized esports teams in the world dropped out of the competition after the first round of the playoffs. At the same time, its opponents in the tournament were Fluxo, Team Liquid and Ninjas in Pyjamas, which are not the teams with which NAVI has an interesting rivalry background. For example, at BLAST Premier Spring 2022 Finals, NAVI faced Team Vitality, and many fans saw that game as a clash between s1mple and ZywOo, the two strongest players in CS:GO. And there, the views probably could have been higher if NAVI had faced FaZe Clan or G2 Esports in the tournament.

First of all, the low result of NAVI affected the popularity of Russian-language broadcasts. Their PV number was 193K at the Spring tournament, but at Fall Finals, it was not higher than 75.1K. This drop was especially evident at the first round of the playoffs. The AV number of the match between NAVI and NiP was 37.7K, but on the next day, when NAVI dropped out of the tournament, that number dropped by 40%. 

Another reason for the drop is the sharp decline in views on a Vietnamese broadcast. In spring, the Vietnamese stream was on the NimoTV platform and had more than 100K PV (about 10% of the total HW). In the fall, the Vietnamese broadcast was on YouTube and had only 6.9K PV (1.7% of the total HW). Clearly, the change of platform did not have a positive effect on the audience reach.

BLAST Premier Fall 2022 Finals fell behind not only Spring Series Finals, but also many other 2022 tournaments: IEM Cologne, IEM Dallas, ESL Pro League S16, and, of course, IEM Rio Major by all metrics. But it is important to note that Fall Finals is not the last BLAST tournament this year. It plays the role of qualification, but we'll see the final statistics of the season at BLAST Premier World Final 2022.

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BLAST Premier World Final 2022 runs from December 12 to 18 in Abu Dhabi at the Etihad Arena. The tournament prize pool is one million dollars. The eight best teams of the season with the most notable victories in 2022 tournaments will compete for it: Natus Vincere, Heroic, Outsiders, FaZe Clan, Team Vitality, G2 Esports, OG and Team Liquid. You can follow the matches on the tournament page at Esports Charts.