The 7-week Esports World Cup 2025 wrapped up with Team Falcons crowned back-to-back Club Championship winners, and every featured title posting growth in at least one key viewership metric. Yet the devil lies in the details: platform and language breakdowns reveal a more complex picture. Several major demographics registered declining activity, and Twitch — while still a core platform for the event — slipped in performance compared to last year.
All in all, the Esports World Cup 2025 outperformed last year’s edition by a wide margin. That was hardly a surprise: the event has now matured into a steady franchise with a stabilizing audience, and its channels are well-established among viewers, making growth largely expected. Even so, the tournament posted impressive gains across core metrics: average viewership jumped by a third to over 181,000 concurrent viewers, while total watch time surged by more than 50%, reaching over 184,000,000 hours of watch time.
EWC 2025 demographics: Key audience shifts
One of the defining features of the Esports World Cup 2025 was its unprecedented linguistic reach. The festival was broadcast in 43 languages, one more than last year’s edition, with the addition of Greek. This sets a new benchmark for multi-title esports festivals: for comparison, even the League of Legends World Championship typically tops out at around 20.
Among single-title events, the record still belongs to The International 2019 and BLAST’s CS Majors in Paris and Austin, each of which offered coverage in 30 languages. The scale of EWC 2025, however, underscores its ambition to position itself as the most globally accessible esports event to date.
Unsurprisingly, Southeast Asia emerged as one of the strongest growth engines. The region’s rising esports powerhouse, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, proved to be a magnet for local audiences and drove massive year-over-year gains. Indonesian viewership nearly doubled (+90%), while the Philippines registered a robust 43% increase, and Malaysia climbed by around 20%. These surges underscore not only the dominance of MLBB in SEA but also the festival’s ability to expand into markets where esports consumption is deeply tied to mobile-first ecosystems.
English-language coverage also surged, consolidating its role as the backbone of EWC broadcasts. With its global footprint and ability to reach audiences across multiple regions, English streams grew by more than 56%, strengthening their position as the central hub for international fans.
Yet, not every demographic shared in the upswing. Russian-language viewership fell by 27%, influenced by the early elimination of popular CIS rosters in CS2 as well as a shortened Dota 2 format that limited potential Hours Watched. A similar story unfolded in Brazilian Portuguese, where the absence of a homegrown CS team cut into demand and dampened the kind of regional enthusiasm that has defined past tournaments.
Still, beyond the headline markets, there were remarkable success stories. Japanese audiences quadrupled (+200%), reflecting the growing appetite for esports content in a country traditionally slower to adopt non-domestic titles. Even more striking was the surge in Hindi-language streams, up nearly 1000% year-over-year — a spike driven by the participation of an Indian team in the PUBG Mobile event. Despite the game’s ban in the country, demand among local viewers remains remarkably strong, underscoring the resilience of the Indian esports audience.
Together, these shifts paint a picture of a festival that is simultaneously consolidating its global reach while also exposing fault lines where regional dynamics and team performance continue to make or break audience engagement.
EWC 2025 platforms: Twitch viewership on the decline
If linguistic diversity made EWC 2025 stand out, the breadth of its platform distribution was equally impressive. The festival was streamed across 16 different platforms, one more than last year, thanks to the addition of Rumble.
Unsurprisingly, the “big three” (Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok) dominated the picture, each generating between 25M and 75M Hours Watched. Yet, beneath that broad balance, their trajectories diverged significantly. YouTube and TikTok surged ahead, growing by 80-100% year-over-year, fueled largely by Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. MLBB has increasingly cemented itself as the flagship property on both platforms, and its Mid Season Cup was, by far, the most-watched event of the entire festival.
In contrast, Twitch remained flat, recording virtually identical figures to last year with a marginal decline of just 0.57%, a number well within the margin of error. Still, the key point is not the decline itself but Twitch’s lack of growth at a time when competitors were posting exponential gains. This shift underscores how the balance of platform influence is subtly tilting away from Twitch, even if it remains one of the festival’s cornerstones.
The divide between major and minor platforms was stark. Smaller services continued to expand but still contributed only a fraction of total viewership. The standout exception was South Korea’s CHZZK, which exploded from a negligible base to over 8M Hours Watched, more than double the viewership of Kick. That leap elevated CHZZK to the #4 spot overall and cemented it as the most impactful of the so-called “secondary platforms”.
Together, these trends point to a changing hierarchy: while Twitch’s role is far from diminished, the gravitational pull of mobile-first titles and younger audiences is increasingly propelling platforms like YouTube and TikTok into the spotlight, a shift that could reshape the competitive landscape of esports broadcasting in the years to come.
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