Chasing Excellence: How the MLBB Mid Season Cup Became One of the Biggest Events in Mobile Esports
Mobile Legends: Bang Bang's first-ever Mid Season Cup is hosting its debut event later this month, beginning on June 28. The event replaces the previous MLBB Southeast Asia Cup, and is part of the Esports World Cup 2024, in collaboration with the event organizers. Taking place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the MLBB Mid Season Cup 2024 boasts a $3,000,000 prize pool, the largest in MLBB esports history.
The event has also expanded to 14 participating regions, the largest in the game’s history. With all of these teams competing, the event is employing a Wild Card, something the esports discipline previously experimented with at the M5 World Championship. The Wild Card Stage will begin on June 28, kicking the tournament off.
The Southeast Asia Cup has had a place in the yearly Mobile Legends: Bang Bang esports calendar since 2017. The event began in Indonesia, hosting teams from various Southeast Asian countries. Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia were some of the countries represented by esports teams, including the host nation Indonesia.
As the event continued to grow, it expanded into the Philippines, where it was hosted in 2019, Malaysia, where the 2022 iteration took place, and other Southeast Asian countries. The event solidified itself as one of the most important tournaments for Southeast Asian competitors over the years, and it began to invite more and more international teams to compete. The re-brand to become the Mid Season Cup is representative of this trend of opening the event up to a larger international audience.
By partnering with the Esports World Cup to host this event, MOONTON Games has its biggest mid-season event ever in the works. The prize pool, which previously stood at $300,000 since 2022, has grown tenfold. The current $3,000,000 prize pool was previously unimaginable for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang; the previous record for the esports game stood at $900,000, which was the purse for the previous 2023 world championship event.
The mobile gaming esports title has shown it has some serious plans for its esports scene. The Esports World Cup is bringing many record-setting prize pools to various esports disciplines, and MOONTON Games has consistently been growing the MLBB scene for years now. As the game continues to reach higher and higher viewership, esports players and organizations within the scene are looking toward a brand-new MLBB ecosystem.
Previous editions of the Southeast Asia Cup have showcased a trend of rising viewership across the past three years. Since 2021, both overall watch time for these cups and their peak viewership have been growing year after year. Although viewership is growing, it is not as simple as every audience growing in size.
The most recent Southeast Asia Cup received 40.55M Hours Watched and a peak viewership of 3.65M concurrent viewers. This was the highest viewership the event iteration had received in its history, and all eyes are on the MSC 2024 to continue the trend.
The 2021 edition of the Southeast Asia Cup enjoyed a broad spread of viewership sources, with audiences from all over Asia tuning in to the event. Although the Indonesian audience was the biggest source of viewership for the event, many other language groups contributed a sizable portion of the tournament’s total viewership, something that has changed in recent years.
As the Southeast Asia Cup grew in size, the viewership of Indonesian-language audiences continued to grow and grow, eventually overshadowing all other demographics. At last year’s Southeast Asia Cup, Indonesian viewership reached a peak more than three times higher than the next-most popular language, Tagalog. Indonesia’s viewership monopoly of MLBB esports events is only getting stronger, and although viewership may rise for this upcoming Mid Season Cup, simultaneously showcasing a healthy spread of audiences and viewership groups would be an impressive feat.
"Our decision to rebrand the MSC reflects the increasingly global and diverse nature of the MLBB ecosystem. While our communities in Asia comprise a large part of our audience, we're also seeing strong growth from up-and-coming regions such as from MENA and EECA, as well as more females entering the ecosystem.
With the tournament venturing out of Southeast Asia for the first time in its history, we are confident that the 2024 edition of the MSC will enable our teams and audiences alike to #SeeTheWorld better than they've ever been able to before!"
Ray Ng, Head of Esports Ecosystem at MOONTON Games
The growth of mobile language viewership for MLBB events has also had a profound effect on the viewership of this mid-year event. In the past couple of years, TikTok broadcasts have only become more and more crucial for the Southeast Asia Cup’s overall viewership statistics. The upcoming Mid Season Cup will be streamed on TikTok for a wide variety of MLBB’s most popular languages, and the event organizers have clearly recognized the potential of a mobile audience for this esports tournament.
Reaching a wide and diverse source of viewership can be enabled by representing many different corners of the world for esports events. Combining global viewership into one singular event can be the difference between hosting a popular tournament and a recording-breaking tournament. It’s no coincidence that this year’s Mid Season Cup is hosting teams from a record-setting amount of regions.
Wild Card Stage participants
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The 8 participants of the Wild Card will be randomly drafted into two separate groups to play a round-robin stage of best-of-one matches. After all matches are completed, the top team from each group will advance to the Decider Stage: a single best-of-five match to determine which lucky participant will advance to the Group Stage of the MSC.
The winner of the Decider Stage will join 15 other teams to make up the Group Stage. For this part of the tournament, the 16 teams will be divided into four four-team groups, with each group repeating another round-robin stage, but this time made up of best-of-two matches.
Group Stage participants
After the groups have completed their round-robin matches, the top two teams from each group will advance to the knockout Playoffs Stage, with the remaining teams eliminated from the event. In the Playoffs, which will take place from July 10 - 14, the eight participants will compete through a single-elimination bracket, with each match being played as a best-of-five. At the end of this bracket, the tournament will be capped off with a best-of-seven grand finals match, which may become one of the most popular MLBB esports matches ever.
MSC 2024 schedule
- Wild Card Stage: June 28 - 30
- 8-team stage with winner advancing to Group Stage
- Group Stage: July 3 - 7
- 16 teams compete for 8 spots in the knockout bracket
- Playoffs: July 10 - 14
- 8 remaining teams play Bo5 matches to advance to the Bo7 Grand Final
The Mid Season Cup 2024 will take place across three weeks, with the Wild Card stage held over a weekend, and the next two phases held through the following two weeks.
Mid Season Cup 2024 broadcasts
- English broadcast: YouTube A, YouTube B, TikTok
- Indonesian broadcast: YouTube, TikTok
- Portuguese broadcast: YouTube, TikTok
- Spanish broadcast: Twitch, YouTube
- Arabic broadcast: YouTube, TikTok, Twitch
- Bahasa Malaysia broadcast: YouTube, TikTok
- Singaporean broadcast: Twitch, TikTok
- Tagalog broadcast: YouTube, TikTok
- Burmese broadcast: YouTube
- Russian broadcast: YouTube, TikTok
Many of the most popular language groups for MLBB esports have transitioned into TikTok live streaming, and some languages are experimenting with this platform for the first time. Across past years, TikTok has been consistently more popular than Twitch and other live streaming platforms, except YouTube Live, for the largely Asian MLBB esports audience.
With a history of growing viewership and the support of the Esports World Cup behind it, the upcoming debut of MLBB’s new Mid Season Cup event is likely going to be one of the esports title’s most popular events ever. Last year’s Southeast Asia Cup received 3.65M Peak Viewers and became the game’s third-most popular event ever. Although the bar is set high, the Mid Season Cup 2024 will be aiming to break this record and put a good foot forward for this new era of MLBB esports.
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