Free Fire Asia Championship 2021 and EMEA Invitational — results of the new regional tournaments

Loading

November 28 marked the end of two major online Free Fire tournaments – Asia Championship and EMEA Invitational. Garena announced the event following the cancellation of the second season of the 2021 Free Fire World Series, which was to be played in LAN format. In the new article, Esports Charts examines the statistics of these tournaments and compares them with other regions where Free Fire enjoys popularity.

It was rumored that the second tournament of the Free Fire World Series 2021 was to be held in November in Mexico – although there was no official confirmation of this. However, due to the difficult situation with the pandemic, Garena decided to abandon the international LAN event. As a replacement, the company established regional competitions for Asian and European teams. Note that the last major leagues of Brazil, Latin America, and India ended at the end of November – and so these regions were left without championships.

Free Fire Asia Championship 2021 — millions of Peak Viewers, but insufficient Hindu activity

The first of the two tournaments was the Free Fire Asia Championship 2021. The championship brought together 31 teams that were selected based on the results of seven regional leagues — Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, and Malaysia/Cambodia/Philippines.

The tournament was broadcast on Facebook, Booyah, and YouTube. The latter has become the most popular viewing platform in terms of Peak Viewers (1M). Twitch was absent from the list due to its low popularity in Asia among the fans of mobile gaming.

Most Hours Watched were generated by viewers of broadcasts in Hindi (37% of the total and 545K Peak Viewers). Indonesians are in second spot with 24% thanks to EVOS, who are famous in the region for their achievements in Mobile Legends: Bang Bang.

It should be noted that the Free Fire India Championship 2021 Fall was held in mid-October, and featured higher viewership activity on Hindi broadcasts (there were 984K Peak Viewers, which is 80% more than at the Asia Championship). At the new Asia Championship, most of the audience left early because not a single Hindu team reached the final, with the highest result being only the eighth spot, taken by Team Elite.

The seventh match of the day of the finals attracted 1M Peak Viewers, and overall 357K Average Viewers have watched the event. That’s an impressive result, which is still far from the discipline’s record, with FFWC 2021 remaining at the top. Nevertheless, the Free Fire Asia Championship 2021 took the third spot in the ranking of the most popular tournaments in the discipline for 2021.

The Vietnamese team HQ Esports became the winner of the tournament. This is the first victory in the Free Fire Major for the team. The MVP title was received by MOMO from the Thai team CGGG, although in the end, they merely took the third spot at the championship itself.

Free Fire EMEA Invitational — CIS esports domination

The second major Free Fire tournament was the EMEA Invitational, which was held for 12 teams from Europe, the CIS, and the Maghreb and Middle East countries. This time, Twitch was responsible for the broadcasts, but YouTube still generated the most Hours Watched (62%).

EMEA Invitational generated 385K Hours Watched and we’ve examined the audience based on this. Channels in Arabic were in the lead, being responsible for 49% of the Total Hours Watched. Following them are the Russian-language channels with 27%. The Free Fire RU YouTube channel attracted 32K Peak Viewers, which is the highest among all channels.

Note that three teams from the top 4 hail from the CIS. Trident Clan took first place (NeZa1s from this team received the MVP award), NAVI came in third and Silence came in fourth.

The results of EMEA are not comparable to Asia due to the huge gap in discipline’s popularity between these regions, with the Asia Championship having generated 10 times more Hours Watched than the EMEA Invitational.

Free Fire regional tournaments comparison

Even though Free Fire World Series 2021 Singapore was on air for a couple of hours less, it greatly exceeded the two regional championships by all metrics. This can be explained by the fact that FFWS united not only Asia and EMEA, but also Portuguese-speaking/Spanish-speaking countries, which are the largest Free Fire regions. Also, FFWS was arguably the most long-awaited event of all. Not only was it the first world-class event in the discipline in 2021, but it was also held offline.

The results of Liga Brasilleira and Latinoamerica show that they are key regions for the discipline along with India. If the organizers were to create a competition for Brazil and Latin America, it would probably show even more impressive numbers than the Asia Championship.

The results demonstrate that the new format of the individual regional competitions were ambivalent. On the one hand, the Asia Championship gathered 1M viewers and entered the top 3 disciplines of 2021. On the other hand, the EMEA competition only reached 98K Peak Viewers (less than the Continental Series EMEA 2020). There was also no separate event for Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries, causing Free Fire to lose a part of its esports audience. The indicators reached by the Free Fire World Series 2021 Singapore exceed the total sum of indicators of both the Asia Championship and EMEA Invitational.

Subscribe to our social networks to stay updated on esports statistics.