New viewership record set by Brawl Stars World Finals 2020

Loading

The Brawl Stars World Championship took place over the weekend. The tournament gathered the world’s eight best teams and set a new record of the discipline: 280 thousand peak viewers. The question is, was this mark reached without cheating?

Brawl Stars World Finals 2020 was held on November 21-22. Eight strongest teams competed for a prize pool of $1 million, half of which was gathered by fans through purchasing in-game content. The victory and 200 thousand dollars went to PSG Esports, which faced INTZ in the final.

The championship’s very beginning turned out to be its most popular moment, with the first hour of the broadcast featuring 258 thousand peak viewers. Afterward, the viewer count started to gradually decline, at the final the peak viewers mark did not exceed 124 thousand. 134K average viewers followed the competition as a whole.

The tournament was broadcasted in over 15 languages. Most viewers were attracted by English-language streams, which became responsible for 38,7% of the competition’s total hours watched. Surprisingly, Turkish became the second most popular language, collecting 17% of the competition’s total hours watched. For Turkish, such a rise in the language ranking happens quite rarely.

There was no wide variety of platform insight, as only the YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook broadcasts were available. YouTube streamers have ranked the highest among the three, contributing as much as 82% of the total hours watched and being responsible for a significant part of the peak viewers indicator. Such an outcome was quite expected, given the presence of mobile esports fans on Google's platform.

It is rather difficult to say that any particular participant of the competition managed to stand out, given that some of them had only a single match to enter. Among these, the match of the Chinese roster of Nova Esports (which has occurred at the beginning of the tournament) happened to gather the most viewers, being watched by 215K average viewers.

To compare, last year's Brawl Stars World Finals reached the mark of 93K peak viewers, while this year’s World Championship has improved this result by 174%. When it comes to the average viewers' indicator, the increase is even more significant: 351%. Still, such growth wasn’t made possible by the esports aspect alone.

This year’s broadcast provided the viewers with a chance of obtaining unique content. This was achieved the following way: the player received in-game notifications, and following these caused that same content to become attached to the account in the form of pins. Namely, the player could get one of several different kinds of pins, some of them being rarer than the others.

For this reason, we’ve seen a significant decrease in viewership since the opening of the tournament. Naturally, the majority of fans chose to leave the broadcast right after receiving their prize. Following this, for the next couple of days, a certain audience share came to the stream only seeking profit, but it was no longer possible to reach the 270 thousand viewers.

As one can imagine, the distribution of free content works wonders for viewership. However, due to such activities, the tournament’s broadcasts are serving to display the level of viewer interest in getting the drops – as opposed to being actually interested in viewing the game’s esports content. Unfortunately, in the case of mobile esports, this approach is rather widespread.