Masters Madrid vs. PGL Major Copenhagen: comparative analysis of viewership
PGL Major Copenhagen 2024 and VCT 2024 Masters Madrid were 2024’s first major official tournaments for their respective games. Counter-Strike 2 hosted other tier-one events in the early months of the year, but the Copenhagen tournament marked the first Valve-sponsored Major for the year and the new release. Valorant on the other hand hosted some regional tournaments, but Masters Madrid was the first international LAN event of the tier-one scene for 2024.
Rather than comparing the general viewership trends of each esports discipline, we wanted to focus on these major international events, which have been the biggest ones of the year for each game. By constricting our view of these two tournaments, we can draw more contemporary points from each title, and highlight how their evolutions differ.
Viewership comparison of Masters Madrid and the PGL Major Copenhagen
The viewership statistics for each event have already been discussed and announced in many articles covering the conclusion of the events. We will not go into detail as to how these basic statistics differ, but it does provide a solid overview of where each discipline currently lies in the overall esports ecosystem.
Comparing the basic viewership metrics for each event directly, the conclusion is that CS2 outperformed Valorant in all metrics except for Average Viewers. How did Valorant manage to outperform CS2 in this one specific metric? It comes down to the overall structure of the two events, which we will explore below.
Highlighted differences between VCT Masters and CS2 Major viewership
Event format
Valorant achieved a higher AV than Counter-Strike thanks to a more condensed event which was attended by fewer teams. The Masters Madrid tournament invited 8 teams, 2 from each major region around the world, to compete across 9 days of matches. The tournament was made up of two stages: the first being a short group stage, which led to the double-elimination playoffs bracket with 4 teams.
Counter-Strike, on the other hand, invited 24 teams for their Major event, and was forced to host many best-of-one matches to proceed through the Swiss System Opening and Elimination stages in a timely manner. These best-of-one games received much less viewership than their Bo3 counterparts at the event, and many matches took place simultaneously. In total, the Masters Madrid event was made up of 16 matches which all received high average viewership; Counter-Strike’s event held over 70 matches, and many of them received much lower viewership than the least popular match at the Masters Madrid event.
Counter-Strike held many more matches, suffered from low AV on some of these games, but overall reached a higher peak viewership. Many of the most popular matches at the PGL Major were supported by community casters, which are becoming a critical part of CS2’s viewership.
Community casters
Valorant has enjoyed the benefits of community casters for years now. Tarik, a Turkish-American Twitch streamer, often is the most popular broadcaster for all international events. At the Masters Madrid event, tarik and other community casters generated 58% of the event’s total watch time, marking an increase of 8% compared to their share of the total Masters Tokyo viewership.
CS2’s Copenhagen Major received 53% of its total watch time thanks to community casters, but this has increased by a staggering 28% compared to the previous Major, the BLAST.tv Paris Major. At the Paris Major, community casters were only accountable for roughly a quarter of the event’s viewership. PGL clarified its community casting rules in early 2024, and the changes favored low-budget watch party streams, and did not allow production companies to host their own cast in an expensive studio.
Platform & language distribution of watch time
Community casters were marginally more important for Valorant’s viewership, similar to YouTube-based live streams. Comparing the total watch time received on Twitch and YouTube Live, Valorant received 32% of its watch time from YouTube live streams. Counter-Strike’s viewership was more of a monolith of Twitch-based live streams, recording only 22% of its watch time from YouTube. Some YouTube channels contributed to the event, but generally fans vastly preferred Twitch for event broadcasts.
Although YouTube is often thought to bring a more international audience outside of English-speaking North America and YouTube, Counter-Strike recorded a wider spread of languages contributing to its viewership than Valorant. Only 40.7% of the PGL Major’s watch time came from English-language broadcasts, and 3 different major languages contributed at least 5% to the event’s total watch time. In Valorant, 47.2% of watch time came from English-language broadcasts, and only 2 major languages were recorded despite a wide array of official Valorant broadcasters spanning numerous languages.
Average view duration of unique viewers
Finally, Counter-Strike 2 Major unique viewers recorded an average watch time double that of Valorant’s viewers. The unique viewers’ average view duration for the PGL Major was just under 5 hours, whereas Valorant’s was just over two hours. This means the average viewer for Valorant watched roughly a single Bo3 match, whereas the average CS2 viewer watched multiple matches before turning away.
Valorant and Counter-Strike 2’s viewership and audiences are quite similar in some metrics, and as different from each other as possible in other metrics. Although the two esports disciplines are both five-a-side shooters, Counter-Strike features a more comprehensive competitive event format, whereas Valorant focuses on delivering a short, intense, and enjoyable viewing experience. Esports Charts offers advanced statistics for each event, and the statistics of each event are available separately for purchase under our pricing page.
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