HCS 2021: Kickoff Major Overview — Can Halo Compete with other NA Franchised Esports Leagues?

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The first truly big Halo Infinite esports event took place last weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina. It featured a $350,000 prize pool shared by some of the most followed esports teams in the world. The event also attracted a lot of attention from the online audience. Esports Charts break down the results of HCS Kickoff Major Raleigh 2021.

First HCS offline event in years was held in Raleigh Convention Center, and hundreds of people came in for December 17-19 to watch top teams from NA, Great Britain and Europe. Unfortunately, rosters from South America had to withdraw from the event as they were unable to acquire visas in time.

NA’s best squads reached the top 8, including FaZe, Sentinels, OpTic, and NAVI. However, it was Cloud9 that won it all: StelluR, Renegade & Eco trio (ex-Splyce) along with Penguin crushed eUnited in the final (4:1) and took home $140,000.

The event peaked at 267K concurrent viewers during Day 2 of the playoffs during FaZe vs Sentinels and Cloud9 vs eUnited matches which were played at the same time. Final became the most watched match of the tournament as it peaked at 212K viewers which is the best result in Halo history.

In just under 37 hours on air, viewers spent over 4.2M hours watching broadcasts of the Kickoff Major, and 26% of that time were the matches of eUnited (#1 by the metric). The average number of viewers watching matches was set at 114.4K.

Interestingly, the most popular team of the tournament by average number of viewers only finished 5-6th. It was OpTic Gaming with over 85K people; it’s 13%+ more than other squads that made it into top 5 by the metric.

Kickoff Major was streamed not only on official Halo channels on Twitch and YouTube, but also by some famous Twitch creators. Cloakzy and scump were the most watched community streamers of the event as both peaked at 28K viewers with cloakzy being ahead by just a few hundred viewers. Interestingly, both are members of Optic Texas, one of the Call of Duty League teams.

Some other popular creators tuned in to watch games of the event with summit1g, teepee and shotzzy in the list. Overall, 16 channels on Twitch and YouTube reached over 1K Peak Viewers during the event.

The official Halo Twitch channel became the most popular of all. It peaked at 173.3K viewers and amassed 2.7M Hours Watched throughout the tournament.

The main question is whether the audience will be as much interested in Halo esports in a few more months. If so, then other team-based shooters with franchised esports leagues should surely be concerned about it.

We compared HCS Kickoff Major stats with the Call of Duty League Championship 2021. Even though CoD’s final match had more Peak Viewers (238.7K during Atlanta FaZe vs Toronto Ultra), HCS was more successful in terms of Average Viewers (+23% compared to CDL 2021). Of course, CDL had no community casters, but even considering that fact the tournaments still showed quite similar numbers by spectators.

More will surely be known during the next season. A couple of days ago CDL organizers announced the details of the 2022 season. Circuit will consist of four majors; OpTic Texas will be the host of the first event of the series. Season will start on January 21-22 with Kickoff Classic event, followed by Opening Weekend on February 4-6.

HCS is also scheduled to resume shortly as the North America Regionals will start early February. Until the end of the year three more regional events two be held, as well as two more majors. Halo World Championship 2022 w/ $1M prize pool is about to be a culmination of the season; tournament is scheduled for October 20-23.

HCS Kickoff Major stats give the signal that we now have quite a competitor to other huge NA leagues. Right now it seems that Halo will be a tough opponent to Call of Duty in terms of viewership, not to mention other tournaments like Overwatch League.

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