Hearthstone World Championship 2021 – All-time Low Result in the Series

Loading

Hearthstone World Championship 2021 became the culmination of the game's esports season. Despite the impressive prize pool of $500K, the event attracted an incredibly small audience, thus setting an anti-record in the game’s history. Esports Charts provides an overview of the competition.

Just like last year, the Hearthstone World Championship 2021 was held online. The event brought together eight of the best players from Europe, China, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas. As usual, the participants competed in standard mode using the cards of the new expansion — "Divided by Alterac" — which was released in early December.

Two Japanese esports athletes met in the decisive match of the tournament. One of them was glory, who won the last World Championship. He could become the first two-time world champion in Hearthstone, but in the end, Posesi did not allow him to defend the title. The series ended with the final score of 3:2.

Nominally, Hearthstone World Championship is the most prestigious and high-profile competition in the game's esports season. However, this year the competition has attracted an all-time low number of viewers. Namely, the tournament attracted only 23.4K Peak Viewers and 16.3K Average Viewers – being exceeded by every other final event in the series. Interestingly, grand final of the competition didn't event reach top 5 matches of the event as it only gathered 19.1K Peak Viewers.

In comparison, the 2021 World Championship had 74% fewer Peak Viewers than the 2020 tournament, as well as 30% fewer Average Viewers. When comparing the World Championship 2021 with the 2019 event, the drop in indicators will be even more catastrophic: since 2020, the exclusive rights to broadcast HS esports events have belonged to YouTube, while the main audience of the game remained on Twitch.

There are several main reasons for the low statistics. The first is the reduction in regional broadcasts: in 2021, tournament matches were covered in only six languages, including English, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Taiwanese. Unlike last year, there were no streams in Russian, Arabic, and French.

The second key reason is the lack of esports athletes with sufficient media presence. In 2020, the Peak Viewers indicator was achieved during the match with the participation of the Russian player SilverName, who is one of the most popular streamers of the game on Twitch. In 2021, not a single player with a comparable fan base made it to the World Championship.

*** 

Despite the disappointing viewership statistics of the HS World Championship 2021, it is definitely too early to give up on the discipline. Blizzard recently announced plans for the 2022 season, and there are some quite dramatic changes awaiting the players.

Next year, the number of World Championship participants will double, the Masters Tour championships will now be much more significant (they will be used to get to the World Championship!), and the next year will be the last for the Grandmasters League – as Blizzard plans on changing the tournament circuit in the future.

As for the most important innovation in the HS esports season, that’ll be the new tournament dedicated to Battlegrounds – the most popular mode of the game. The prize fund of Lobby Legends will amount to $500K for the entire season, and you can also expect the tournament to attract popular streamers of the game. It seems that 2022 is about to be better for HS.

Want to analyze tournaments yourself? Take advantage of our PRO subscription. For in-depth analysis and comparison of tournaments by team, language, and platform, you will need access to the Esports Charts Dashboard, which can be purchased from our sales team.