BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2022 — Viewership Overview of the Event

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February 6 marked the end of BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2022, in which 12 teams competed for the share of $177.5K and slots for the finals of the BLAST Premier spring season. Let us describe how the first major CS:GO championship of 2022 took place.

The tier-1 scene of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has seen a lot of changes during the winter break. CompLexity Gaming signed the Extra Salt roster, ropz reunited with Karrigan under the FaZe Clan tag, two Astralis star players joined Team Vitality, nitr0 left Valorant and returned to Team Liquid CS:GO roster, G2 Esports swapped captains with OG and bought out a 16-year-old m0NESY from NAVI Junior, and Ninjas in Pyjamas continued to perform without device, who took a break in early December. It may be too early to judge the success of these reshuffles, but the results of BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2022 are already quite telling.

As a result of the tournament, FaZe Clan, OG, Vitality, BIG, NAVI, and G2 qualified for the BLAST Premier Spring 2022 Finals. In turn, Astralis, NiP, MIBR, Evil Geniuses, Liquid, and CompLexity got into the Spring Showdown 2022, where they will fight with ten more teams for reaching the finals of the spring season.

The best player of BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2022 was Nikola NiKo Kovač from G2, who got into the top 3 of the HLTV world ranking for 2021. At the same time, NAVI sniper Alexander s1mple Kostylev (#1 player of 2021) is in the fifth spot due to NAVI having an extremely unsuccessful start of the championship and losing the first two matches.

In total, viewers of BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2022 generated 18.4M Hours Watched, and attracted 262.94K Average Viewers. At the same time, the most popular match of the tournament was the encounter of NAVI and MIBR - which collected more than 542K Peak Viewers. BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2022 entered the top 3 tournaments in January based on this indicator.

It is worth noting that NAVI became the most popular team of the championship, having collected more than 5M Hours Watched. At the same time, the matches with the participation of the team amounted to 373.66K Average Viewers, which is the highest indicator across the tournament.

BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2022 was able to improve almost every viewership activity indicator as compared to the same kind of tournament last year. Hours Watched increased by 45% and Average Viewers by 32%. However, last year's encounter between NAVI and FaZe Clan attracted 1,847 more viewers than the current encounter between NAVI and MIBR.

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The tournament season in CS:GO has just begun, but the viewer activity has already grown significantly. In the second half of February, the world’s best teams will take part in IEM Katowice 2022, the prize fund of which will be $1M. In March, ESL Pro League Season 15 will take place, while BLAST Premier: Spring Showdown 2022 will be the highlight of April. And, finally, taking place in May will be the first major of the year PGL CS:GO Major Antwerp 2022, the playoff stage of which is planned to be held at the stadium with viewers.