Call of Duty League Championship 2021: Tournament Results and Viewership Stats

The second season of the Call of Duty League has recently come to an end with a $2.5 million grand finale — the Call of Duty League Championship 2021. The culmination of the league, also commonly known as CDL Champs, followed after seven months of regular season play and featured the top eight Call of Duty teams that fought their way through the competition.

The championship took place at the Galen Center in Los Angeles between 19th - 22nd August, with the attendance of a live audience bound by strict coronavirus measures.

Naturally, a lot of excitement accompanied the event, although it wasn’t enough to break the league’s viewership record from last year’s CDL Champs.

The third most-watched CoD event

Following four days of fierce competition, Atlanta FaZe have claimed the champions title along with the $1.2 million main prize after proceeding undefeated through the bracket and taking down Toronto Ultra in the grand final.

The match peaked at 238.7K concurrent viewers, which was also the highest peak of the championship. Compared to the Call of Duty League 2020 Finals event, which set a new all-time record for the discipline (331K Peak Viewers), the number of concurrent viewers went down by 27.98%.

That said, it’s still a remarkable outcome for Call of Duty esports. The grand final of CDL Champs 2021 placed itself as the third most-watched Call of Duty event of all time (by Peak Viewers), right after Call of Duty World League Championship 2018.

During 21 hours of Air Time, the event gathered over 1.95M Hours Watched — 38.9% less than last year’s championship. Note that the CDL Champs 2020 was broadcasted for 34 hours, which is 38.24% more than the duration of this year’s edition. As we can see, the number of Hours Watched generated by each of the competitions was directly proportional to their Air Time, with viewership by this metric being approximately the same for both events.

On average, 92.6K viewers tuned in to spectate the action, marking a 1.94% decrease in viewership compared to 2020’s championship.

Atlanta FaZe leading all the way

Not only Atlanta FaZe dominated the tournament in terms of score, but the squad also ended up being the most popular team of the event with 138.1K Average Viewers. No surprise there — the team has had a truly successful season, winning three out of five Majors in 2021.

The second most-watched team of the championship was Toronto Ultra with 109.4K Average Viewers and the highest Hours Watched count. Toronto Ultra’s only win this season came in the grand final of the Stage 2 Major, where they defeated Atlanta FaZe in a thrilling matchup.

The third was Optic Chicago with 91.3K Average Viewers, followed by New York Subliners with 80.1K AV and Florida Mutineers with 75.3K AV.

Was the result inflated by viewership rewards?

To attract a higher number of spectators, Activision prepared a special offering for those watching the 2021 Championship. For simply tuning in, viewers had a chance to earn an array of exclusive in-game rewards, including an Open Beta code for the publisher’s upcoming title — Call of Duty: Vanguard.

Motivated by the vision of securing a special reward, surely many tuned in, which certainly had an impact on the event’s viewership results. Although there’s no way to tell how many people were watching only for rewards, it’s a fact that should not be left out when analyzing viewership statistics.

On the other hand, it’s just one of the factors with an impact on the overall viewership and it’s become a part of the strategy for building an esports scene used by numerous game publishers. In fact, this year’s Champs event is no different from its previous edition. The same strategy was used last year, when viewers were able to earn free beta codes for Black Ops Cold War, among other special rewards.

Furthermore, let’s not forget that despite CDL Champs 2021 not breaking any viewership records, the league’s viewer count has been showing a positive trend during the whole series, with most of the major events drawing notably more attention than the inaugural season.

This shows that the popularity of the Call of Duty League is indeed rising and that the volume of spectators gained thanks to dropping promo codes is no more than a welcome bonus to its growing audience.

Overtaking Overwatch League

To set the CoD League into the context of the current esports scene’s popularity, we compared the viewership stats of this year’s CDL Championship event with recent major events of other popular FPS esports titles, namely Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, VALORANT, Overwatch and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege.

In terms of concurrent viewership, the closest to the viewership results of CDL Championship 2021 is R6 with the recent Six Mexico Major 2021. The event reached 137.2K Peak Viewers, which is 42.5% less than Champs 2021.

The recent Overwatch League 2021 Countdown Cup attracted even fewer spectators, peaking at 71.7K concurrent viewers — 70% less than CDL Champs 2021. The popularity of the OWL has seen a notable decline this season and therefore fell behind the rising CDL.

On the contrary, CS:GO esports is, as currently the most popular FPS esports title, way ahead of the Call of Duty League. Its recent IEM Season XVI Cologne 2021 event, with 843.3K people watching, became the second highest viewed non-Major CS:GO tournament of all time, after IEM Katowice 2020. That’s 253% more than the viewer count of the CDL Champs 2021.

As for VALORANT esports, the recent VCT 2021 Stage 2 Masters Reykjavík broke its own record and placed its viewership among the top spectated CS:GO Majors when it surpassed the peak of 1M concurrent viewers — a number for which the CDL still has a long way to go.

All in all, the second season of the Call of Duty League can be considered a success, partially due to Activision’s efforts to attract more viewers. Even though the concluding event of the 2021 wasn’t a record-breaking one, the league has been seeing increased numbers compared to its inaugural season and is most likely looking to further growth.