Flashpoint 2 — the excitement surrounding MIBR and the new Cloud9 roster

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December 7th marked the end of Flashpoint Season 2, with the renewed and rested (due to shortage of summer activities) Virtus.pro becoming the winners. However, the tournament’s main audience was not CIS-based, as the championship attracted the fans of MIBR first and foremost, while many viewers were also interested in the debut of the new Cloud9 roster.

General statistics — Flashpoint’s popularity still intact

The tournament’s statistics of views and viewers were comparable to those of the first season. The second season gathered almost 205 thousand peak viewers, which is 27,4% less than the first season. Flashpoint 2 was also watched by 61,734 average viewers, which is 23,5% more compared to the first tournament.

The second season saw the revision of the group stage by the organizers, with the number of matches reduced and the duration of broadcasts being affected accordingly. The competition’s overall duration was reduced by a quarter: 123,66 hours versus 165,50 hours. Still, this didn’t affect the championship negatively, seeing how the total hours watched only had a slight decrease of 8,3%.

The figures of Flashpoint Season 2 were similar to those of the first season. There was a slight decrease in the peak viewers, but also an increase in the average viewers. The tournament made positive progress in terms of the ratio of hours watched to airtime as well. It should be said that Flashpoint had every right to reach even higher figures, however, the tournament’s timeframe coincided with that of the DreamHack Masters Winter matches in the European division. If not for this, the FACEIT event would get several tens of thousands of additional viewers.

The tournament’s audience — now with more viewers from the CIS

Compared to the first season, the hours watched for Flashpoint Season 2 English broadcast decreased by 3,1%. Meanwhile, the Russian-speaking viewers watched twice as much content, with the respective hours watched growing from 3% to 5,8%. This was due to both the audience's interest in the CIS-based teams (VP, forZe) and the lack of broadcast-related problems. While in the case of the previous tournament the first matches were broadcast by RuHub studio only for the rights to be subsequently transferred to U Can Company, this time UCC was responsible for the broadcast from start to finish.

Flashpoint's partnership with MIBR, the most popular Brazilian tag in the history of Counter-Strike, continues to attract many Portuguese-speaking viewers to the tournament. While such superstars as FalleN, fer and TACO are no longer part of the team, the team keeps attracting the interest of the audience, and so the Brazilians keep being responsible for about 30% of the hours watched.

All the other streams amounted to just 1,6% of the total hours watched. This time it was the Polish (rather than Finnish) broadcast to enter the top-4. The interest of the Finnish audience declined a little given that this time, not a single local team made it to the tournament through the qualifiers – as opposed to the first season when HAVU Gaming made it to Flashpoint.

The top matches — with MIBR being unrivaled

Flashpoint gathered the most viewers at the matches of MIBR. While the first season the match between the Danes and the Americans entered the top-5, this time all the five most popular matches featured the Brazilian teams.

The moment that gathered 204 826 peak viewers was during the MIBR vs Fnatic battle in the semifinals of the upper bracket of the playoffs. The top 5 also included two matches of Brazilians vs OG, as well as the match of the tournament’s first day when the Brazilians faced off against BIG.

As expected, Flashpoint 2 did not break the peak viewers record (after all, the Brazilians did not reach the final) - but on average, all the top matches gathered more viewers. To compare, in the first season only two matches exceeded the mark of 150 thousand viewers, while in the second season there were five such matches.

The most popular teams – who else besides the Brazilians?

The general idea of which teams were of interest to the audience becomes vaguer when the statistics on the matches of the Brazilian teams are taken into consideration. The matches with the participation of MIBR brought the most excitement, which simultaneously meant the inclusion of the team’s rivals (BIG, OG, Fnatic and Team Envy) in the top 5 most popular teams.

The statistics of the English broadcast show us a slightly different view of the championship. The audience of the official stream didn’t give specific preference to any particular team and so all the figures are approximately equal, with a rather small gap of just over 10 thousand viewers between the top 1 and top 5 spots.

It is not surprising that the fourth to the second spots on the English stream were taken by the teams that have progressed through the tournament ahead of others: Virtus.pro, Fnatic, MIBR and OG. Interestingly enough, Cloud9 was ahead of others (despite being the first to leave the championship) with its matches being watched by 49 thousand average viewers. This was partially influenced by the hype surrounding the team’s formation, especially given the debut of the roster of Alex “ALEX” McMeekin at Flashpoint 2.