Call of Duty Mobile World Championship 2021 — two years of problems have affected viewership statistics

Loading

The Call of Duty: Mobile World Championship ended on December 12. Initially, the final tournament was supposed to take place offline, but due to pandemic the organizers decided to hold the championship online and split it by West and East regions. The change of format affected the viewership statistics of the tournament: nominally the most important competition in the discipline attracted less viewers than some of the regional events.

Problems have haunted the Call of Duty: Mobile World Cup for two years in a row. In 2020, Activision had planned to hold a LAN at the end of regional leagues, but it was eventually canceled due to the pandemic. The developers held regional qualifiers one more time in 2021, but the LAN final was cancelled again.

Because of the format change, the number of teams increased from 16 to 24. Among popular organizations Team Vitality, NAVI, FunPlus Phoenix and DG Esports qualified for the tournament. The winner of the West Division was Tribe Gaming, and the MVP title went to Kent "Banned" Nerves. Blacklist International won the East championship and Averson "Skerd" Salaya was named the MVP.

Disclaimer: Chinese statistics are excluded due to their unreliability. 

West results

The West Finals were held on 4 and 5 December. The broadcasts took place on the two most popular western platforms, Twitch and YouTube. The majority of viewers followed the event on YouTube (98% of total Hours Watched).

The West Finals were broadcast in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. The English-language channels generated 57% of the Hours Watched from the total. Spanish-language streams accounted for 29% of this metric.

In addition to the official channels, the tournament was broadcast by community streamers, who attracted extra viewers. Ferg, the content creator from Tribe Gaming, even surpassed the official broadcasts in Peak Viewers — 6.2K people were concurrently watching his stream.

The American organization Tribe Gaming led the tournament in every aspect: their content creator's channel was the most popular of all, the team won the tournament, and their final match was top-1 at the event with 16.5K Peak Viewers (note that the event's Peak Viewers number was reached during group stage when several matches were LIVE concurrently). The Americans were also the top-1 team in terms of Average Viewers (13.4K people).

East results

The East tournament ran on December 11-12. The Peak Viewers number of the tournament was identical to that of the western division — 18K spectators. The matches with the biggest audience fell on the last day of the tournament. The final match between Blacklist International (a Filipino organization known for their achievements in Mobile Legends: Bang Bang) and Almighty (the team also played in ML:BB) was the most popular. BI not only won the tournament, but also became the most popular playoff team with 12.1K Average Viewers.

Call of Duty: Mobile World Championship 2021 East Finals were broadcast on Twitch, YouTube and Facebook (the organizers added the latter platform as it is popular in Asia). YouTube topped the Hours Watched ranking with 83% of the total. Facebook came next and accounted for 16% of the total Hours Watched. Unlike the West division, the streams were held only on official channels in Asia.

Should Activision run more Asian tournaments?

The viewership statistics for both regions of Call of Duty: Mobile World Championship 2021 are far from the highest compared with the main competitors — mobile Battle Royale games. Even in-game prizes for watching the broadcasts did not help to attract more viewers.

Asian Qualifier attracts more spectators than the International Championship

Garena Finals was the Asian qualifier for the World Championship. This tournament reached 56K Peak Viewers (twice as many as the East Finals) as it featured some of the best teams from the region. At that time, the Philippine team Omega Esports was the tournament's favorite in terms of performance and number of viewers. The team didn't qualify for the final championship, but their matches were watched by 32K Average Viewers.

The absence of the region's most popular team had a direct impact on the East's performance as no top teams made it to the tournament: the top 3 teams from Garena Finals by Average Viewers failed to qualify for the main event. Perhaps Activision should take a closer look at Asia and expand the Call of Duty ecosystem there to get a bigger fanbase. As for the west, mobile esports there is still in its infancy stage, especially Call of Duty Mobile. 

Subscribe to our social networks to keep up-to-date with all the latest esports statistics.