The final season of the once major Hearthstone esports series — Grandmasters 2022 Last Call results

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Grandmasters 2022 Last Call came to an end last weekend, the last tournament in the series, where sixteen best players of the season competed for a $150K prize pool and a slot in world championship. In a new article, Esports Charts will tell you about the end of this once major series of the Hearthstone esports scene, and how many viewers its last tournament attracted.

The final Grandmasters Series tournament featured the Top-4 players of the first season from each region, as well as the Top-4 players based on rankings of the last three Masters Tour tournaments in 2021 and the first three tournaments of 2022. Players competed in the Conquest format with 1 ban in the first week, followed by the Trio format in the second week, and the Last Hero Standing format with 1 ban in the third week.

Based on the results of three weeks, eight best players made it to the playoffs of the event. The leaders of groups were Bunnyhoppor (Team Liquid) and French e-athlete xBlyzes. Both of them advanced to the Grand final, where xBlyzes won with the score of 4:3. He earned $22.5K and a slot in the upcoming Hearthstone World Championship 2022, while Bunnyhoppor won $15K for second place.

Grandmasters 2022 Last Call Viewership Statistics

Tournament broadcasts totaled nearly 992K Hours Watchead and drew 8.1K Average Viewers. The Peak Viewers number of Last Call was 15.2K people at the Grand final between xBlyzes and Bunnyhoppor. At the same time, almost all of the games in the Top-5 most popular matches of the tournament attracted more than 13K Peak Viewers each.

Grandmasters 2022 Last Call was broadcast only on YouTube in six languages. The most popular of them, English, accounted for 70% of the total Hours Watched of the tournament. Korean, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish are the next most popular languages. Thai broadcasts made the smallest contribution to the Hours Watched of the event, fewer than 0.1%.

Grandmasters 2022 Last Call has become both twice as popular as the regional Grandmasters 2022 Season 1 events and one of the Top-5 Hearthstone tournaments of the year. It ranks behind three Battlegrounds Lobby Legends events and 2022 Asian Games South Korea National Qualifiers by Peak Viewers. At the same time, Last Call has become the longest running Hearthstone tournament in 2022.

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The history of the GrandMasters series began in the spring of 2019. The first tournaments drew 40K-60K Peak Viewers, but in 2020, amid the general decline of Hearthstone's popularity, their numbers almost halved. GrandMasters events have rarely drawn more than 15K Peak Viewers since 2021, and more often fewer than 10K Peak Viewers. Considering the negative trend in viewership statistics, Blizzard Entertainment's decision to close the GrandMasters series looks reasonable.