More languages, channels among broadcast gains at BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2024

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After around a week of action at the BLAST Studio in Copenhagen, Denmark, the BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2024 ended on January 28. With a slightly modified format, it only saw a small fall in its watch time figures despite the airtime significantly dropping while the average online viewership went up.

With 16 teams from Europe and North America competing for places at the season final, FaZe Clan, Natus Vincere, Virtus.pro, Team Vitality topped their groups to ensure direct qualification. Each side also took home $22.5K out of a total prize pool of $190K and earned 2.4K BLAST Premier points.

G2 Esports and Astralis later won their Play-In Stage encounters to join the four names above in the main round of the season finals. These two teams got richer by $12.5K and notched 1.8K BLAST Premier points each from the year's first S-tier Counter-Strike 2 tournament.

The remaining sides will head to the BLAST Premier: Spring Showdown 2024 from March 6 to 10. They will be joined by six other regional Masters/Cup winners, with all these participants duking it out to decide the final two slots at the BLAST Premier: Spring Final 2024 (June 12 to 16).

  Most popular games and basic statistics from the BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2024   

The BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2024 hit 328.7K Peak Viewers during the Group Stage, Day 6 clash between global powerhouses G2 Esports and NAVI. In fact, their meeting from four days earlier was the second-most popular match at this CS2 competition, making them the only sides alongside Astralis with multiple entries on this table.

Unlike last year, only one game passed the 300K PV mark in 2024, although the top two games at both events involved the same sides. This tournament also racked up 12.1M Hours Watched and 169.7K Average Viewers over around 72 hours of airtime.

While these figures might seem lesser than 2023, the tweaked format actually helped the organizer reduce the airtime by over 14 hours while hardly compromising the watch time and seeing a manageable drop in the peak concurrent viewership. There was also an increase in the number of matches overall, meaning fans got to see more of their favorite sides in action but did not have to spend as much time doing so as last year.

The fight for the most popular side by average online viewers was close, with only two teams passing the 200K AV mark. In the end, the top five had a familiar look, with all the entries being some of the most popular in the discipline globally.

Like the BLAST Premier Spring Groups 2023, Twitch and English were this competition's dominant platforms and languages, although they did see dips in their percentage shares of the overall watch times. The emergence of BLAST.tv and Vietnamese were worthy of mention, with both eating into the shares of their respective segment leaders.

  Comparing the viewership stats of the last two editions of the BLAST Premier: Spring Groups   

The viewership numbers of the BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2024 more or less remained the same as last year despite a modified format. There were regional changes in terms of interest levels among specific language speakers, with the major one — English — seeing a decrease in its HW and AV numbers while another well-followed one in Polish went missing from the live streaming list.

Despite the absence of Brazilian sides, with this community being a massive contributor to the overall success of Counter-Strike 2's esports segment, Portuguese’s numbers across the board rose from last year alongside Russian. Another definite positive was the continued growth of the number of Ukrainian viewers, whose average concurrent viewership rose by a significant 66.6%. Moreover, there were new languages added to the broadcast, including Kazakh, which was added to the live broadcast list this year by esports broadcasting studio and tournament operator Paragon Events.

It's a big year for the game and its esports scene, with the entire shift to a new, improved game still being felt by fans and professionals. The number of platforms streaming the action has also gone up, and the hope among players, fans, and organizers will be that it continues to enjoy record-breaking numbers and moments in its newest avatar.