Gamers8 2023 opening day generates strong viewership, rivalling the top Major events in comparison

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Gamers8’s 2023 CS:GO event opening day generated impressive numbers for the series, especially in terms of peak concurrent viewers. The first-day matches received such strong concurrent viewership, that the event’s Day 1 viewership rivals the first-day viewership of the most popular CS:GO Majors of the last two years.

Gamers8 hosted their first series of esports events in 2022, and although they boasted millions of dollars in prize pools at each event, their viewership remained low. Their Gamers8 Rocket League Tournament in 2022 boasted a $2M USD prize pool that saw some of the best teams in the world flock to Saudi Arabia to compete. Despite the large cash prize, numerous top-level teams, and their extensive and professional broadcasting team, the event reached only 31.6K Peak Viewers. Now in 2023, their CS:GO event is finally getting the attention they’ve hoped for.

Gamers8 2023 CS:GO Day 1 Viewership statistics

Gamers8 opening day started off to immediately strong viewership as the MIBR vs Team Vitality game drew in 255.7K Peak Viewers: already an impressive feat that would rank the game within the top-15 most popular events of the year. However, following that game was NAVI against Furia Esports. A clash of fan favourites managed to bring CS:GO audiences together to reach an impressive 429K peak concurrent viewers. 

Looking at our CS:GO teams page, NAVI is one of the most popular teams in the discipline, and FURIA Esports just falls outside of the top-five teams, when ranked per Peak Viewers. The match-up is also ideal from a demographic perspective, combining NAVI, the global viewership superpower of CS:GO, with a Brazillian team that receives huge regional support, and features FalleN, another veteran fan favourite esports professional for fans.

S1mple sends his team to match point against FURIA with four frags

A peak viewership of 429K fans ranks the event already within the top 10 most popular events of the year, and impressively the event experienced the second-most popular first day of viewership for any CS:GO event this year. It failed to beat out the BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023, which received a peak concurrent viewership of 671.7K on its first day. However, it is hard to outperform an official Valve-sponsored Major event which was also the last Major for CS:GO: a fact which helped the tournament to become the third-most-popular CS:GO event ever.

The first day alone brought in almost 2.8M hours of watch time and the stream was receiving an average of 243K viewers during its run-time. Since the first day, viewership has stayed high and the event is accumulating millions of hours of watch time. Esports Charts will of course publish a recap article for the viewership of the entire event once it ends, but at this rate, the tournament will easily break the 10M hours of watch time barrier before it ends. For reference, the most-popular five-day event of 2023 for CS:GO was the BLAST Premier: Spring Final 2023, which received 9.1M hours of watch time.

Most popular CS:GO events of 2022 & 2023, by first-day viewership

As previously mentioned, Gamer8’s first-day viewership was second only to the opening day of the BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023. To expand our data set, we collected the top-ranking CS:GO events for 2023 and 2022, specifically in terms of their first-day viewership.

Gamers8 2023 slips down the rankings slightly when 2022 is included, and IEM Dallas 2022’s opening day slots in between it and the BLAST.tv major, with less than a thousand more peak concurrent viewers recorded than Gamers8. The IEM Rio Major 2022’s debut day of matches was the most popular opening for an event through the last two years, clocking in with 752K Peak Viewers; the PGL Major Antwerp 2022 took the top spot for the highest Average Viewers recorded however, with an average of 495K fans watching at any given moment throughout the first day. 

Ultimately, Gamers8 2023 is hugely successful to rank within all of these iconic CS:GO events. The inaugural Gamers8 CS:GO event was officially more successful in terms of viewership than the opening days of the last two IEM Colognes, which are considered the “Cathedral of Counter-Strike”. Gamers8 fell just shy of ranking above IEM Dallas 2022’s Peak Viewers, but Gamers8 recorded the highest Average Viewers of any non-Major event in the last two years. Perhaps a new household name is entering the Counter-Strike industry because they’ve proved they have what it takes to bring in viewership.

The event will continue throughout this weekend, culminating in the Grand Final at 7PM CEST on Sunday the 20th of August. Heroic and ENCE are confirmed to play a Semi-Finals match on Saturday and Team Vitality will face off against the winner of Virtus.pro and G2 Esports for the other Semi-Final. Critically, NAVI, Cloud9, and GamerLegion have all already exited the event. Keep track of the event with Esports Charts’ tournament page.