ESL Challenger set a new 2024 viewership record at Jönköping thanks to support of regional audiences

Loading

The second ESL Challenger LAN event of 2024, ESL Challenger Jönköping 2024, crowned Complexity Gaming as its champion after a weekend of exciting games, featuring some of Counter-Strike’s most popular teams. The viewership of the event was significantly boosted by the community casters, and the event reached a climax of 76.1K Peak Viewers.

Throughout 2024, the ESL challenger event series will host four LAN events, each featuring a $100,000 prize pool. The second event of the year, DreamHack Summer in Jönköping, Sweden, was significantly more popular than the previous Australia-based tournament and set the bar for the remainder of the year. In total, the event generated 719.7K Hours Watched.

The grand final featured Team Falcons against Complexity Gaming, but it was not the most popular match of the event. Complexity’s match against MIBR was significantly more popular than other games at the event, where Complexity eliminated the Brazilian roster from playoff contention. This game received over 76K concurrent viewers, thanks to the support of Brazilian community casters. 

Portuguese, an umbrella term that encompasses both Portuguese and Brazilian-Portuguese, was the most popular language of the event’s coverage thanks to these community casters. Portuguese-language broadcasters received the highest peak concurrent viewership at the event, although English-language broadcasts accumulated more watch time.

Gaules was the second-most-watched broadcaster to cover the event, and the Brazilian co-caster brought a large community of fans supporting MIBR with him. Gaules’ viewership was highly dependent on the success of MIBR at the event, and although he covered the grand final of the tournament, he received abnormally low viewership for this stream. 

Gaules did receive a higher peak viewership than the official ESLCS channel during this tournament, but ESLCS managed to hold onto a more stable viewership throughout, leading them to earning over 100K more Hours Watched than the Brazilian co-caster.

META, a Mongolian tech and esports channel, also covered the event, and became the most popular YouTube channel to cover the Challenger tournament. The channel received a significant boost to its viewership thanks to the attendance of Mongolian roster The MongolZ. The team recently claimed first place at YaLLA Compass 2024, and Mongolian esports audiences have been avidly following their games. Although the Mongolian team failed to qualify for the playoff stage at the Challenger event, they remained one of the tournament’s most popular teams.

For our Esports Charts PRO users, the most popular teams of the tournament by average viewership were interestingly not the teams which advanced furthest in the event. Many of the teams represented in this top 5 exited the event early, leading to a curious viewership spread for the event: ESL Challenger Jönköping 2024 was one of the rare esports events where the group stage received far higher viewership than the playoffs.

  Comparison of ESL Challenger 2024 events 

Compared to the ESL Challenger at DreamHack Melbourne 2024 which took place earlier this year, the recent Swedish event achieved far higher viewership across the board. The event’s viewership was boosted by the community casters which covered the event, as aforementioned, but in general, this tournament was also simply more watched than the previous one. 

This paints a positive trend for the remainder of 2024, with the next ESL Challenger events taking place in October and December. These events may continue the positive viewership trend for the ESL Challenger series, but this will likely depend on which teams qualify and attend. 

As it stands, the current viewership record for an ESL Challenger event stands at 149.3K PV, achieved during the ESL Challenger #48 tournament. If the remaining two tournaments of the event series for 2024 can continue its upward trend for viewership, the final event of the year may be able to set a new record for the ESL Challenger event series.