Clash Royale League 2022 results — community casting makes the mobile title popular again

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Clash Royale League 2022, with a prize pool of $1 million, ended in Helsinki on September 25. The tournament surpassed last year's World Championship by twice the number of Hours Watched and Peak Viewers, mostly owing this to the coverage on influencers channels. Esports Charts team sums up the results of the event and calculates the number of viewers it attracted.

Clash Royale is a popular mobile RTS with KKI elements by Supercell. The Clash Royale League is annually run by the game's publisher, and everyone can take part in it. One have to pass a long qualifying stage to get to the CRL final: first you must win the necessary number of times in the ladder stage, then take a certain place among the participants during the allotted period of time, pass the double-elimination bracket and two stages of the Swiss system. All these qualifiers began on August 6, resulting in only the top 16 players qualifying for the LAN-finals, held September 23-25 in Finland.

The Egyptian player Mohamed Light defeated the German player Morten in the Clash Royale League 2022 Grand Final. The champion won $250K, while his opponent earned $125K. Third place went to the Brazilian player Samuel Bassotto, he got $80K.

Viewership Statistics 

Clash Royale League 2022 matches accumulated 1.4 million HW. The AV number on broadcast was 58.8K: we should note that we also have included qualification data as part of the tournament, which affected the total number. The AV at the qualifiers gradually rose from 3K to 10K people, and the PV number was 13.7K people. 

As for the LAN tournament in Helsinki, the AV number there exceeded 100K people, and its PV number was 228K concurrent viewers at the Grand Final between Mohamed Light and Morten. The most watched player in the league is Mohamed Light, as matches with his participation accumulated 463K HW.

The main languages of Clash Royale League 2022 broadcasts are Spanish and English — they accounted for 28.6% and 27.8% of the total HW number and also drew 59.1K and 55.7K PV, respectively. German is the third most popular language, it accounted for 14.3% of the HW total and drew 39K PV. 

As for platforms, viewers watched the tournament mostly on Twitch — the streaming service by Amazon accounted for more than 57% of total HW: this is a remarkable fact, because mobile games do not usually enjoy a lot of popularity on Twitch. YouTube accounted for more than 42% of HW, and Facebook accounted for fewer than 1% of HW.

The official Clash Royale Europe YouTube channel amassed 316.5K HW and reached 47.7K PV — it is interesting that it showed approximately the same result at last year's World Championship.

The leaders in community casting are Spaniards RevolAimar and bale_gg, as well as the German streamer BigSpinCR, who broadcast the matches on Twitch. Their broadcasts helped Clash Royale League 2022 to increase its metrics significantly.

Comparison with other tournaments

Clash Royale League 2022 doubled Clash Royale League World Finals 2021 by HW and PV. If we compare the 2022 event with the previous World Championships, it ranks second in the discipline's history by PV and HW  because of the longer airtime). In terms of AV, the league ranks fourth.  

Clash Royale League Viewership

The Clash Royale League World Finals 2018 tournament remained unbeaten, holding records by all metrics. This tournament racked up 2.4 million HW and drew 361.8K PV.

We have also compared the audience reach of Clash Royale League 2022 with the metrics of Clash of Clans World Championship 2022, another tournament by Supercell, held in another company-developed mobile title. Clash Royale numbers are two to three times higher than those of Clash of Clans.

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Without the participation of popular streamers or content creators it would be difficult to find a new audience. The game was released back in 2016, at the dawn of mobile esports, but since then it has become outdated — the trend for RTS and KKI has given way to mobile MOBAs and Battle Royales. Nowadays, the industry has plenty of other mobile titles with a much larger audience and prize pool, as well as a more developed esports scene. For example: PUBG Mobile, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Free Fire, and other games.