Brawl Stars was the most-watched event of DreamHack Winter 2023
DreamHack returned to Jönköping in Sweden for its yearly Winter event. The gaming expo hosted many esports tournaments for a wide array of disciplines. From Counter-Strike to mobile gaming, DreamHack Winter had everything covered.
The Elmia Convention Center in Jönköping hosted various DreamHack Winter events, alongside other ESL competitions. In between the meet and greets, cosplayers, and other activities hosted at the gaming convention, mobile gaming rose to the top of DreamHack esports scene.
Overall, DreamHack Winter 2023’s esports offerings accumulated 4.51M Hours Watched. Highly dissimilar to the DreamHack Dallas 2023 event, where the IEM Dallas CS:GO event dominated viewership, this time around mobile gaming title Brawl Stars was the top dog of viewership.
The Brawl Stars World Finals 2023 event is the ultimate event of the esports season for the title, and the fifth edition of the yearly Finals event. It featured the top teams worldwide and became the most-watched World Finals for the discipline, with 3.1M Hours Watched. The event’s monstrous viewership was only matched by its equally large prize pool, the biggest of any tournament at the expo.
Although Counter-Strike’s ESL Challenger at DreamHack Winter 2023 event was not as popular as the mobile gaming tournament, it still received significant viewership. The ESL tournament received 1.16M Hours Watched but suffered from being held during the same weekend as the BLAST Premier Fall Final 2023.
The BLAST event featured a prize pool four times larger than its ESL counterpart, and the top teams of Counter-Strike opted to attend the BLAST event instead. Nevertheless, the ESL Challenger at DreamHack Winter featured some strong teams and managed substantial viewership considering the strong competition for viewership in Counter-Strike that weekend.
The remainder of the events at DreamHack Winter were not able to bring in the same viewership as Brawl Stars or CS2. The DreamHack Winter Rocket League event suffered particularly from poor viewership, reaching only 25 Peak Viewers. Compared to the larger events at this year’s expo, the Rocket League and Valorant events were simply not in the same league as other tournaments in Jönköping: both events featured a prize pool of less than $2K.
The DreamHack Winter Fortnite event was the most popular of the DreamHack-branded events, benefitting from a larger prize pool which drew some more significant names from its respective scene to the event. Although it outperformed the other DreamHack events, it remains a smaller event for the discipline.
The ESL R1 2023 Fall Major struggled to garner viewership despite its large prize pool, only contributing 0.4% to the total watch time of DreamHack Winter. The Rennsport major tournament reached 2.6K Peak Viewers, roughly 600 viewers less than the previous Spring Major this year. The Fall Major may have suffered from being held during the same weekend as the 2023 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in Formula 1, with motorsport fans potentially preferring to watch the final F1 race of the year.
eFIBA Season 2 managed to outperform the Rennsport event in terms of peak viewership, despite featuring a much lower prize pool. eFIBA is an emerging name in the NBA 2K scene, and it may need more time to get a foothold in the discipline to generate more viewership.
The viewership for DreamHack Winter 2023 was extremely top-heavy, but this isn’t out of the ordinary for DreamHack events. Similar to DreamHack Dallas 2023, where Counter-Strike dominated viewership, DreamHack Winter 2023 received solid viewership for its larger ESL and third-party events, but the official DreamHack-branded tournaments struggled to generate attention from live-streaming platforms.
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