Gwent Masters 2022 — Can it challenge Hearthstone esports?

Loading

Gwent does not appear in the esports media as often as other CCGs, but CD Projekt Red continues to develop and improve its brainchild, and regularly hosts the Gwent Masters event series. Esports Charts tells about what awaits the game's scene in 2022, and whether it can compete with Hearthstone by online competition audiences.

What's new is Gwent Masters?

The season has consisted of three events in the Gwent Open series (instead of four as it was before) since 2022, and the best players from the open qualifiers take part in these events. The top eight players will be determined at the end of the events and they also will receive an invitation to Gwent World Masters, the main tournament of the year. 

It is interesting that the first Gwent Masters season wasn't played until the summer of 2021 (although it was planned for 2019) because of the coronavirus. After its results, the organizers congratulated fans of the game jokingly with the "end of the longest season in the esports history".

In the new season, only the Open event winners will be invited to the final tournament, and the remaining places in Gwent World Masters will be determined during a special Play-In tournament, where 12 players with the highest number of points will be invited. Read more about the new season's rules changes here. Moreover, due to the war in Ukraine, organizers have restricted players from Russia and Belarus from participating in Gwent Masters Season 4.

Gwent 2022 esports season is currently running — Gwent Open #1 ended a month ago. The winner of the event was the Moldovan Sergey magpie13 Sorochkin, and the tournament itself amassed 151K Hours Watched in 15.5 hours being on air. The semifinal between Pajabol Pole and magpie13 is the most popular match, which attracted 13.5K Peak Viewers. The Average Viewers number of the tournament was close to 10K people.

Gwent Open comparison

The start of the Gwent Masters professional season has not been a huge success, but it certainly hasn't been a failure either. Gwent Open #1 Season 4 surpassed only Gwent Open #4 Season 3 by Hours Watched, and is behind both the previous season opener and Gwent Open 3 Season 3 by Peak Viewers. Nevertheless, the numbers show that the Gwent esports scene, in general, has its own stable (and considerable) audience that regularly follows the discipline's championships.

Gwent vs Hearthstone

We cannot help but compare Gwent to its main competitor in the CCG genre, Hearthstone. This year, HS has already hosted the first season of Grandmasters 2022 and two Masters Tour events. All of the tournaments are well ahead of Gwent Open 1 Season 4 by Hours Watched, but this is mainly due to the fact that all HS tournaments had at least twice the airtime of the past Gwent tournament. 

The situation looks very different in terms of Peak Viewers. Despite Blizzard's huge army of CCG fans, only the Masters Tour 2022 Ruins of Alterac's Peak Viewers number managed to get close to that of Gwent Open 1 Season 4. We should remind you that the extremely low Peak Viewers number of HS tournaments was due to the broadcasting exclusively on YouTube, which is not very popular with viewers. Gwent Open 1 Season 4 was successfully broadcast on Twitch, YouTube and attracted several hundred fans on Trovo.

Gwent's competitive season continues on July 2, with the second Open Series tournament. The Gwent World Championship is scheduled for December 2022.

You can get access to more detailed statistics of the tournament with a PRO subscription. If you want to get full statistics for a particular tournament, use the special buttons “Buy full stats or Access advanced stats” on event pages.