CCT Season 1 Global Finals draws record viewership, first big triumph for Eternal Fire

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On the evening of May 23, the grand finale of the CCT Season 1 Global Finals, one of the largest online leagues for Counter-Strike, took place. The event amassed over 2.9 million hours of watch time and set a new peak viewership record for the series.

The Champion of Champions Tour, which started in 2022, has since held regular online tournaments across Europe, North and South America, Oceania, and other regions. The CCT Season 1 Global Finals emerged as the biggest tournament in the series, featuring top teams from various regions competing for a prize pool of $500,000.

Renowned teams such as Fnatic, ENCE, Astralis, OG, and Team Liquid were among the participants. The Turkish team Eternal Fire triumphed, defeating Team Liquid with a score of 3-1 in the decisive match. For their victory, XANTARES and his team received $250,000, marking the largest prize ever won by Eternal Fire.

This successful event highlights the growing popularity and competitive spirit of the Champion of Champions Tour.

The peak viewership for the CCT Season 1 Global Finals reached 149.4K concurrent viewers during the grand finale, making it the only match of the tournament to surpass 100K. The second most-watched match was between Team Liquid and Astralis, attracting 87.7K concurrent viewers.

The most popular languages for the CCT Season 1 Global Finals were English and Portuguese, each accounting for 33% of the total viewing hours. Russian, Polish, and Turkish also had significant shares of the viewership.

Throughout the tournament, matches were streamed on over 60 different channels. The primary channel with the widest audience reach was the official English-language channel, cct_cs. The only other platform to rival its reach was the streamer Gaules, broadcasting concurrently on both Twitch and YouTube.

Most popular CCT Season 1 Global Finals by Average Viewers

Gaules' streams significantly influenced the tournament's viewership. During the group stage, his community-casted matches involving Brazilian teams attracted notably more viewers than the official broadcasts. Gaules' coverage propelled two series featuring MIBR against BIG and BetBoom Team into the top five most-watched games of the tournament. However, during the playoffs, with no Brazilian teams left in contention, the excitement surrounding Gaules' streams waned, and viewer numbers between official and unofficial broadcasts became more balanced. For instance, the match between MIBR and BetBoom garnered 63.8K viewers on Portuguese streams, whereas the grand finale between Team Liquid and Eternal Fire attracted three times fewer viewers, with only 21.9K tuning in.

Among the community casters, it's noteworthy to highlight the Turkish streamer imorr, who focused solely on covering matches of Eternal Fire and secured the third position in peak viewership among all tournament channels. Additionally, the Polish streamer OfficialHyper also made it into the top five for this metric. During the ENCE versus Fnatic match, he successfully established a new peak viewership record for his channel.

  CCT Most Popular Events   

The CCT Season 1 Global Finals reached the highest peak viewership ever recorded in the series. Previously, the most popular tournament was the CCT Central Europe Malta Finals, drawing 92.8K viewers simultaneously.

Another notable achievement of the CCT Season 1 Global Finals is its placement among the top three most popular online tournaments for Counter-Strike in 2024 (as of the article's release). However, the current leader in this category remains the BLAST Premier: Spring Showdown 2024.

  Most popular online Counter-Strike events of 2024 so far