Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 set record for viewership

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Brawl Stars World Finals 2022, the final Brawl Stars tournament of the year, hosted by game developer Supercell, ended on November 27 in Paris. Event streams attracted a record number of viewers, surpassing all previous tournaments by audience reach. Find more details in a new Esports Charts article.

Tournament Results 

Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 featured the 16 best teams in the world, who scored the highest points in the regional qualifying stages. Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 had a starting prize pool of $500K, but it was doubled before the end of the event to $1 million, thanks to a crowdfunding campaign that included in-game merchandise sales.   

Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 was divided into a single-elimination bracket, where they played matches until three victories (in the finals — until four). ZETA DIVISION ZERO and ZETA DIVISION ONE, two teams of the Japanese esports club ZETA DIVISION, faced off in the decisive series. ZETA DIVISION ZERO won 4-1. 

ZETA DIVISION ZERO team with the Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 trophy / Photo: twitter.com/Brawl_esports

It is notable that the Japanese club was not the only one that was represented by two individual rosters at the World Championship. Tribe Gaming (American and European lineups) and Chasmac Gaming (Brazilian and European lineups) also had two teams each. In other esports disciplines, tournament organizers usually do not allow that to avoid possible conflicts of interest. As for ZETA DIVISION ZERO and ZETA DIVISION ONE, these teams have already encountered each other in many tournaments, including the Asian regional Brawl Stars Championship series tournaments. Now they are two of the strongest teams not only in Asia, but also in the world.

Viewership Statistics

Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 matches amassed nearly 3 million Hours Watched and drew 200.2K Average Viewers. The event reached its maximum concurrent viewership of 394K Peak Viewers at the the series between Tribe Gaming EU and ZEST LATAM on Day 2 of the tournament. 

ZETA DIVISION ONE became the most watched team of the tournament with 913K HW. ZETA DIVISION ZERO is in second place with a 16% lag. Chasmac Gaming BR became the leader by average online viewership — its matches drew 335.8K AV.

English became the main language of the tournament broadcast — it accounted for 65% of the total HW. Spanish (17%) and Portuguese (5.1%) are also in the Top 3. As for the distribution by platform, Twitch accumulated 87.2% of total HW, and the remaining 12.8% of total HW were accumulated on YouTube.

The official English-language brawlstars channel on Twitch became the most popular channel of the tournament — it gathered 285K PV and amassed 1.6 million HW. In second place is Spanish-language channel thealvaro845 — it had 52.1K PV and 488.2K HW.

Comparison with Other Tournaments

Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 has become the most popular tournament in the history of the discipline. By all metrics, it easily surpassed previous years' World Championships: the AV number increased by almost 50%, and the PV number — by 53%. 

It is important to note that the activity of the tournament's viewers declined more and more every day, and the final matches ended up being among the least popular. This may be due to the fact that two Japanese teams encountered each other in the Grand Final and it was not convenient for Japanese fans to watch the match because of time zones (the finals were played in Paris). On the other hand, Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 did not even have an official broadcast in Japanese.

According to another version, the audience of the tournament was more active in the first days, because the organizers added an integrated system of awards on the website of the game, where the broadcast was. There, viewers predicted the results of matches, and received in-game rewards for correct predictions: pins, spray and a skin for a hero. The casual audience probably came to the broadcast only for these rewards, but did not stay to watch the matches further. This is supported by the analysis of the tournament audience.

Predictions and prizes / photo: event.brawlstars.com  

Tournament Audience Analysis

The declining audience dynamics of Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 can be called an anomaly, because usually the number of viewers reaches the maximum mark by the Grand Final instead of falling. So how did the tournament manage to set new records in all metrics? 

Analysis of the broadcast shows that the majority of Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 viewers were "occasional guests". This is primarily shown by the very low percentage of Authorized Viewers — 5.33% for the entire tournament and 3.69% for the official BrawlStars channel. About 70% of viewers watched under half an hour of broadcasts from the total of 14.5 hours of Airtime. Moreover, nearly 34% of Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 viewers did not open Twitch at all during the week prior to the tournament (November 18-24) which indicates that these people do not visit Amazon's streaming service often or prefer to watch content on another platform (YouTube). 

Only 6.8% of authorized Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 viewers watched Brawl Stars streams the week before the event. In other words, most viewers were not interested in watching Brawl Stars at all on Twitch before the tournament. For example, Just Chatting (44.7%), Call of Duty: Warzone (18.1%), Pokémon Scarlet/Violet (16.4%), CS:GO (16%) and other titles ranked among their preferences. The Brawl Stars category itself ranks only 15th in this ranking, just slightly ahead of the Virtual Casino category (6.49%). When it comes to specific channels, Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 had the most Authorized Viewers watching streamers such as ibai (8.9%), Amouranth (6.2%) and buster (5.7%). 

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The factors listed above show that the organizers of Brawl Stars World Finals 2022 have found a way to increase the audience of the tournament to record numbers. On the other hand, it is difficult to say how long these viewers will remain interested in the game after the event is over.