EWC Apex Legends reached high viewership despite little Japanese coverage of event
As part of this year’s Esports World Cup gaming festival, the Apex Legends Esports World Cup 2024 event brought 40 esports organizations together from around the globe to compete for $2,000,000, matching the largest prize pool the esports title has ever seen. Apex Legends esports has seen viewership plateau slightly in recent years, but the recent EWC event was unable to match the achievements of Apex Legends Global Series events, the game’s official esports circuit.
The tournament took place across four days, beginning on August 1, and ultimately, Swedish esports organization Alliance were the champions of the Summer, taking home $600,000 and 1,000 Club Points for the EWC Club Championship.
To claim the first spot of the event, teams in the final stage needed to generate 60 points by accumulating good results, and then entirely win a round. It came down to an electrifying finish, with Alliance finishing the event with 112 points, and more than 13 teams having achieved 60 points. Viewership for the event reached its peak during this final round, with 219.8K Peak Viewers recorded for the tournament.
Across the four days of matches and intense gameplay, the Riyadh-based event generated more than 2.58M Hours Watched and maintained an average viewership of 98.3K concurrent viewers. 98.3K AV is one of the highest average viewerships that Apex Legends has seen all year, and the EWC event was one of the most popular events of the year.
Unusual for Apex Legends, the event received the vast majority of its viewership from English-speaking audiences, with no other language coming close to the viewership of this demographic. Arabic-language broadcasts were unusually popular compared to other Apex Legends events, but this is to be expected, as we have seen Arabic-speaking content creators support all events taking place at this year’s EWC so far.
Usually, we would expect Japanese-language viewership to be particularly sizeable for Apex Legends events, but this year’s EWC tournament was covered by essentially no Japanese broadcasts. Usually, Japanese is fighting with English for the spot of most popular language at Apex Legends tournaments, but at this year’s EWC event, the Asian language did not even rank within the event’s top 5 languages.
Although the tournament was in fact one of the most popular events of the year for the esports discipline, it trailed far behind the year’s most popular event so far, the ALGS: 2024 Split 1 Playoffs. This event was the first of three Major tournaments for this year’s Apex Legends Global Series circuit, and the series’ remaining Major events of the year will likely outperform the viewership achieved at the Esports World Cup this year.
The key reason for the gap between the Esports World Cup and the ALGS Major event was community casters. The EWC 2024 was broadcast by none of the sizeable community casters we usually associate with Apex Legends esports events, except for NiceWigg. The 100 Thieves affiliated streamer was the event’s most popular broadcaster, and NiceWigg generated a significant portion of the event’s total peak viewership.
If we look towards the ALGS: 2024 Split 1 Playoffs for some examples of the usual suspects of Apex Legends esports co-casting, Japanese esports organizer and broadcasting organization esports_RAGE was noticeably missing from this year’s EWC tournament. The organization broadcasts across both Twitch and YouTube Live, and they are usually the host to tens of thousands of Japanese Apex Legends fans.
Aside from this broadcasting organization, many of Apex Legends’ well-known content creators did not co-broadcast the EWC 2024. Content creators such as ボドカさん, penguinz0, and DisguisedToast are not only known to co-broadcast Apex Legends events, but they all also have their own esports organizations competing in events: RIDDLE, Not Moist, and Disguised, respectively.
Despite RIDDLE and Disguised both competing at the event, neither of their associated content creators co-broadcasted the event, and Not Moist seemingly turned down an invitation to the event, as they performed well enough during Split 1 of the Pro League to earn a spot. The EWC’s lack of sizeable community casters was a significant reason as to why the event’s viewership fell behind the ALGS’ Split 1 Playoffs.
Despite this setback, the event was still more popular than any other Apex Legends event of the year. The viewership for the EWC 2024 outperformed all the ALGS’ regional pro circuits and other third-party esports events for the title this year. The EWC has also been utilising community casters across other esports tiles to boost viewership, so the event will likely remedy the issue that saw it fall short next year.
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