Hearthstone World Championship 2022 — the worst viewership stats in the series
Hearthstone World Championship 2022, a tournament with a $500K prize pool, ended last weekend. Unfortunately, despite its status, the tournament showed the worst viewership statistics in the history of the series. In a new Esports Charts article, we will tell you how many viewers watched the major Hearthstone championship, and speculate about the future of the "classic" esports HS.
Hearthstone World Championship 2022 featured 16 top players in the world: four from Grandmasters circuit, four from Chinese Gold Series, and eight qualified via Masters Tour. Two Team Liquid representatives, the German player Raphael BunnyHoppor Peltzer and the Englishman Jack DeadDraw Bancroft, faced off in the Grand Final of the tournament. It is interesting that they played a total of four matches against each other during the championship. BunnyHoppor won three of them, including the decisive one.
Viewership Statistics
Hearthstone World Championship 2022 was on air for almost 36.5 hours and amassed 475K Hours Watched, with 13K Average Viewers. The event saw 21.8K Peak Viewers at the title match. It should be noted that almost the same number of Peak Viewers were attracted by the semi-final of the tournament between Bunnyhoppor and the Chinese player YuYi.
English became the most popular broadcast language of Hearthstone World Championship 2022, with over 65% of the event's Hours Watched. Korean and Japanese are also in Top 3 by this metric — they contributed 11% and 8% of HW to the tournament's total, respectively. YouTube became the main platform for broadcasting the tournament.
Most popular Hearthstone World Championships
As mentioned above, Hearthstone World Championship 2022 has become the most unsuccessful tournament in the series in terms of viewership statistics. It is more than 15 times behind the 2016 championship by Peak Viewers, the leader by this metric, and almost 10.5 times down from World Championship 2017 by Average Viewers.
Hearthstone World Championship 2022 ranked in the Top 4 most popular tournaments of the year in the discipline, but ended up outside the Top 100 Hearthstone tournaments of all time. We should note that the last World Championship to make it into the discipline's Top 100 was the 2020 tournament. However, even then the statistics indicated that Hearthstone's classic mode events have been losing their popularity. Four tournaments in Battlegrounds mode ranked in the discipline's Top 7 tournaments of the year. They were less prestigious than the World Championship, but attracted a comparable audience.
In the new year, we should expect Hearthstone esports to return to Twitch, just as it already happened with Call of Duty (and it turned out to be a great success). Of course, the statistics of HS tournaments should begin to grow: but whether the growth will be a multiple is a big question. Currently, the most popular mode is the "Battlegrounds": it would be logical if the publisher focus on the development of its esports scene.
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