Gaules excluded from PGL Major 2024 official broadcasting — how crucial is he for Major's viewership?
Gaules is one of the most well-known names in the Brazillian Counter-Strike scene. A historical figure in the community, initially as a professional player and more recently as a community caster, Gaules has built a wide following for himself as the go-to Brazillian broadcaster for Counter-Strike events. However, for the first time in over four years, Gaules will not hold the Brazillian-Portuguese broadcasting rights to the upcoming Counter-Strike 2 Major.
Over the past handful of years, Gaules has experienced meteoric growth to the top of Twitch. His Counter-Strike coverage for his home region, Brazil, sees him receive extremely high viewership for games featuring Brazillian teams, and still consistently high viewership for other matches. A pioneer of the ‘watch party’ coverage, Gaules implemented a casual and relaxed atmosphere in his coverage which now is dominant in Counter-Strike and other esports disciplines like Valorant. With over two decades of presence in the Brazillian CS scene, he has become crucial to its viewership ecosystem as nearly every Brazillian Counter-Strike viewer knows his name.
Gaules has consistently been one of the most-watched broadcasters across the past Counter-Strike Majors and often is crucial to the esports discipline’s viewership. After dealing with why he will not be officially broadcasting the upcoming PGL Major, we want to answer how his departure may potentially affect Counter-Strike’s viewership for one of the biggest events of the year.
Who is Gaules?
Alexandre Borba Chiqueta, known professionally as Gaules, began his esports career in the early 2000s as a professional Counter-Strike player. After a handful of years as a professional esports player, Gaules transitioned into team management, worked at Samsung, and eventually returned to esports in the 2010s.
He worked within the tournament organisation side of esports, before moving away from these projects and eventually deciding to begin live streaming on Twitch. Gaules’ reputation within the Brazillian Counter-Strike scene was already strong at this point, and he quickly picked up traction as a streamer.
By 2018, Gaules was recognised internationally as one of the most prominent Brazillian Twitch streamers and was garnering enough watch time to be one of Twitch’s most-watched broadcasters. The next year, he reached 100K concurrent viewers for the first time, signed official broadcasting agreements with various Counter-Strike tournament organisers, and solidified himself as one of the most popular Counter-Strike casters.
Gaules has held the rights to broadcast Counter-Strike Major events since the StarLadder Major Berlin 2019, and the fact that he will not be the official BR-PT broadcaster for this event came as a surprise to many. Instead of Gaules, the rights have gone to BTSBrasil, who have entered a partnership with BetBoom. So, what happened to cause Gaules to lose his broadcasting rights?
Why has Gaules lost the rights to broadcast the Major
For the BetBoom Dacha event late last year, BetBoom partnered with BeyondTheSummit Brasil to broadcast the BR-PT stream of the event, leaving Gaules to do one of his “radio” streams. Gaules decided to commentate the games while broadcasting the HLTV scoreboard of the match, letting his viewers listen in to Gaules whilst watching the match elsewhere. The next day, Gaules received a letter from BetBoom threatening legal action.
Gaules went live to discuss the situation, quoted saying:
“Yesterday we tried to bring a format so that you could watch, and what happened is that this company that organises the championship, the sponsor of the championship, sent a message that was practically a subpoena, saying that we are not supposed to talk about the championship, it is not for us to broadcast, it's not for us to do battery radio, we're not supposed to do absolutely anything regarding the championship.
[...]
Let's prepare, organise ourselves, and I hope that in the future we can be partners. I want to broadcast and I believe that people want us to broadcast and that it is good for everyone. I believe that if you do it and do it right, good things will happen, and that's it.”
BTSBrasil recently published some community casting rules for those wishing to cover the upcoming Major should follow. Community casters are allowed to broadcast the matches through the CSTV (formerly GOTV) in-game spectating system, however, they are not allowed to display any material from the official broadcasts. Critically, broadcasting companies and employees of broadcasting companies are prohibited from community casting, as they are considered “Commercial Broadcasts.” This would directly affect Gaules, who is currently in partnership with the Brazillian entertainment company Omelette Group.
Gaules is determined to broadcast and cover the upcoming PGL Major Copenhagen 2024 however he can, in whatever form his coverage must take, as he expressed in a recent Twitter post. However, Gaules is a crucial part of Counter-Strike’s global viewership, and his disappearance as an official broadcasting partner of the Major may affect its viewership. This can be seen in the viewership for the BetBoom Dacha event late last year.
At the BetBoom Dacha event, some of the most popular matches of the event featured Brazillian teams FURIA and MIBR. MIBR finished in 3rd place at the event, which usually would result in extremely high Portuguese viewership. However, viewership did suffer, and MIBR’s Playoffs match received only 71K Peak Viewers. Portuguese was only the third most popular language of the event, falling behind English and Russian.
Gaules’ lack of coverage for the event was not entirely negative. One positive aspect of this was it allowed other community casters a chance to shine and enjoy exposure to a new hungry Brazillian audience. Former Fnatic and FaZe Clan legend olofmeister has been turning to Twitch streaming in recent times since stepping back from competitive play. At the BetBoom Dacha event, olofmeister received 28.8K Peak Viewers for his coverage of FURIA’s match against Team Spirit, which is his most popular stream to date. Olof seemingly enjoyed exposure to Gaules’ lost audience, and currently, Olof’s top 3 most popular streams ever are all his coverage of the BetBoom Dacha event, two of these broadcasts reached their peak while he covered matches of FURIA.
Compare this to the ESL Challenger at DreamHack Winter 2023, an undoubtedly smaller and less prestigious event, where MIBR also finished in 3rd place. MIBR’s Playoffs game against Eternal Fire received 136K Peak Viewers, roughly half of which came directly from Gaules’ Twitch stream. Portuguese became the most popular broadcasting language of the event, receiving 174% more Peak Viewers than the next most popular language.
Gaules’ lack of coverage for the BetBoom Dacha event clearly resulted in a drop in viewership. Despite MIBR finishing within the podium places, viewership was lower than expected and lower than the viewership for comparatively smaller events. So, to understand how Gaules’ removal as the official BR-PT broadcaster may affect the upcoming Major’s viewership, we first have to understand how Gaules contributed to past Majors’ viewership.
Gaules’ viewership for the past 3 Counter-Strike Majors
Across the past 3 Counter-Strike Major events, PGL Major Antwerp 2022, IEM Rio Major 2022, and BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023, Gaules was the most-watched broadcaster of the event for two of these, ranking third at the most recent Parisian Major. His coverage of these events has been instrumental to the viewership achieved by Counter-Strike esports in recent times, and we have calculated his contribution to the overall watch time of these 3 events.
In total, the past 3 Majors have garnered 196.51M Hours Watched in total. The Twitch broadcast of Gaules have contributed 22.2% to this total, or over 43M Hours Watched. In other words, Gaules is the source of more than a fifth of Majors' total viewership. At the PGL Major Antwerp 2022, Gaules was the most-watched broadcaster for the event and received roughly 3.76M Hours Watched more than the official PGL Twitch channel.
The PGL Major Anterp 2022 also became the second most popular Counter-Strike event with 2.11M Peak Viewers recorded during the Grand Finals between FaZe Clan and NAVI. Gaules’ most popular match of the event was the Legends Stage Day 3 match between Imperial and Cloud9. The match received 1.06M Peak Viewers in total, and Gaules contributed 734K Peak Viewers to this figure or 69.3% of the match’s total PV. Gaules received more Peak Viewers for this match than the pgl official broadcast received during the 2.11M PV Grand Final.
Gaules’ most popular matches across the past 3 Majors all feature a Brazillian team, either Imperial or FURIA. It’s clear that Gaules earns a significant portion of his viewership thanks to loyal and patriotic Brazillian Counter-Strike fans, but his own popularity is not to be underestimated. At the IEM Rio Major 2022 event, which was held in Brazil, more than 20+ channels broadcasted the event in Portuguese. In total, these 20+ channels received 19.26M Hours Watched. Gaules garnered 18.79M Hours Watched, meaning he contributed 97.6% of the total Portuguese-language watch time for this event.
It is yet to be seen what form Gaules’ coverage of the upcoming PGL Major Copenhagen 2024 will take, however, it is clear that losing Gaules as the official BR-PT broadcaster can only harm the event’s potential viewership. The BetBoom Dacha event was unable to reach the full potential of Portuguese-language viewers without Gaules’ support, and the most recent Counter-Strike Major events have been hugely dependent on Gaules for generating watch time and hype.
However, Gaules’ disappearance from the event coverage may allow other community casters to enjoy success. As mentioned before, olofmeister enjoyed success on Twitch he had never seen before while covering FURIA’s games at the BetBoom Dacha event, and if Gaules had covered the event this likely would have never transpired. With Gaules taking a step back, other community casters and Brazillian creators may have the perfect chance to shine.
Gaules is determined to continue his event coverage, support of Brazillian teams, and community-orientated broadcasting atmosphere, despite the hardships ahead of him. Keep an eye on the upcoming PGL Major to see how it can perform viewership-wise without Gaules’ support with the Esports Charts viewership statistics, which will be continuously updated as the tournament continues.
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