Free Fire World Series 2022 Sentosa: How Much has the Audience Decreased?

Last year's Free Fire World Series set the esports world record for concurrent viewership (excluding Chinese platforms), but its audience has fell off insanely this year. Esports Chars talks about the tournament, which took place on the tropical island of Sentosa, and explains what caused the drop in audience.

A whole year has passed since the last FFWS event: one of the tournaments was supposed to take place last fall, but Garena had to cancel it due to unstable situation with the coronavirus. Free Fire fans were looking forward to the resumption of the World Series, but there was no big hype around the event still.

The event featured top teams from all over the world, including Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The victory in the final went to the Thai team Attack All Around, which was only one point (!) ahead of their compatriots from EVOS Phoenix. It's the first ever trophy for the team in Free Fire esports and a huge improvement compared to last year's results, as the squad only placed 17th in FFWS 2021 Singapore.

Free Fire World Series 2022 Sentosa Viewership Statistics

The format of the tournament has not changed since last year, it still consisted of two game days: the Play-In stage and the finals. The matches were broadcast for over 8 hours in total and during this time they gained 4.8 million Hours Watched with an average audience of 592K viewers. Thus, the average audience of FFWS fell by 72% compared to last year's event.

Traditionally, Garena gave out game gifts for watching the broadcasts during the FFWS, but this did not help the tournament to attract an audience comparable to last year's championship. Peak Viewers number only reached 1.47 million, which is 73% less than at the last event of the series.

The fall in the audience is due to several factors. Perhaps the most important of them is the absence of teams from India at the tournament, since Free Fire was banned in this country in February 2022 (the same case was with PUBG Mobile in November last year). It is noteworthy that Hindi still became the top 1 language of the tournament by PV and third by HW, but its performance would have been much higher if a local team had performed at the championship.

In addition to India, the CIS was not represented at the tournament as well, as the local league was canceled due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. It is noteworthy that the tournament was still broadcast in Russian.

The performance of other languages also fell significantly, including Portuguese broadcasts. Although the Brazil’s popular team LOUD qualified for the tournament, this time Team Fluxo, where one of the most popular e-athletes in the country plays (Nobru), could not qualify for the event.

Most popular Free Fire events by Peak Viewers

Thus, FFWW 2022 Sentosa became only the fifth most popular tournament in the discipline by viewership peak. It lost not only to the 2019 & 2021 tournaments of the series, but also to the continental leagues for America and Asia.