BLAST Premier: World Final 2023 falls short of surpassing last year's peak online viewership

Loading

On December 17th, the BLAST Premier: World Final 2023 concluded in Abu Dhabi, marking the final tier-S event of the year for Counter-Strike 2. It gathered 361.9 thousand concurrent viewers at its peak, slightly trailing behind the previous year's series finale. The overall outcome could have been higher, but several factors hindered it.

The BLAST Premier: World Final 2023 featured eight European teams competing for a total prize pool of one million dollars. Just before the tournament, many teams underwent reshuffles in preparation for the upcoming season. For instance, Team Vitality, FaZe Clan, MOUZ, and ENCE had new players joining them less than a month ago (some even days before the tournament). There were also changes in coaching staff: the Abu Dhabi tournament marked ENCE's first event with a new coach.

After the group stage of BLAST Premier: World Final 2023, ENCE and Heroic exited the tournament, while Team Vitality and FaZe Clan emerged as leaders in their respective brackets. These same teams clashed in the tournament's grand final, where Vitality defeated their opponent with a score of 2:0.

For Team Vitality, this marked their third victory at a major international tournament in 2023, having previously claimed the championship titles at BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023 and Gamers8 2023. As for individual awards, ZywOo emerged as the best player of BLAST Premier: World Final 2023 — he now boasts 18 MVP medals from HLTV.org. With a high likelihood, French sniper is poised to become the best player of 2023.

BLAST Premier: World Final 2023 Viewership Statistics

In total, the matches of the BLAST Premier World Final 2023 amassed 5.7 million hours of viewership, with an average of 151.7 thousand concurrent viewers.

The most popular encounter was the grand final match between FaZe Clan and Team Vitality — it drew in 361.9 thousand concurrent viewers. In 2023, these teams faced each other seven times at international tournaments, with Team Vitality emerging victorious six times. The previous match between the squads took place in the grand final of the BLAST Premier Fall Final 2023, where Vitality also claimed victory.

It's worth noting that FaZe Clan and Team Vitality stand as the two primary leaders in the professional Counter-Strike scene right now. Throughout the outgoing year, they secured victories in the majority of international tournaments, occupying the top two spots in the HLTV.org rankings, significantly ahead of other teams. However, Team Vitality sometimes falls short in terms of viewership compared to FaZe, despite having a better win-loss record in their head-to-head meetings.

Comparison of the BLAST Premier: World Final 2023 with other tournaments

The BLAST Premier World Final 2023 demonstrated relatively modest results in terms of peak online viewership (compared to other tier-S events of the disciplne), failing to secure a spot among the top 10 CS tournaments of 2023 based on the metric. Among its counterparts in the top tier were the BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023: European RMR A (373,964 PV) and IEM Dallas 2023 (323,143 PV).

The World Final 2023 not only fell short compared to last year's finale but also drew half the number of viewers as the World Final 2021. The BLAST Premier World Final 2023 marks the culmination of the season with the largest prize pool at stake. However, it turned out to be less popular than the seasonal BLAST Premier Fall Final 2023 and BLAST Premier Spring Final 2023.

The most popular BLAST Premier series tournaments in 2023

One of the primary reasons why the BLAST Premier World Final 2023 couldn't match the audience reach of previous tournaments was its schedule. Just like last year, the event was held in Abu Dhabi, and matches began quite early for most European countries, and the schedule was also far from optimal for those watching it in NA. 

Another significant factor was the reduced audience reach on Russian-language broadcasts. For comparison, the peak online viewership for Russian broadcasts during the BLAST Premier World Final 2021 reached 248.1K viewers, whereas it only amounted to 49.9K in the World Final 2023. This notably impacted the overall tournament statistics, considering Russian is one of the primary languages in Counter-Strike alongside English and Portuguese. 

Why did this occur? Obviously, the major reason is that s1mple is no longer in the active roster of NAVI. Another one is that Russian viewers used to avidly support Natus Vincere, but in 2023, Russian players left the team and the organization shifted to a European roster. Currently, Cloud9 is the most appealing team for Russian-speaking fans, but its performance at the BLAST Premier World Final 2023 was relatively weak (finishing 5th-6th out of 8 participants) and hasn't shown consistent results overall.

A similar situation occurred with the Portuguese language. With no Brazilian teams at the World Final 2023, Portuguese-language broadcasts by Gaules couldn't gather a larger audience.

For the second consecutive year, the final tournament of the BLAST series has shown weaker statistics compared to the seasonal tournaments (Spring/Fall). This suggests that scheduling the season-ending tournament at the year's end doesn't guarantee significant audience engagement.