IEM Dallas 2023 live viewership drops 46% compared to last year

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IEM Dallas 2023, one of the largest CS:GO tournaments of the summer, ended with the victory of ENCE last Sunday. In the final, Marco Snappi Pfeiffer’s team defeated MOUZ, bringing the club their first trophy in over four years. Due to problems with logistics, several teams missed the championship, including Natus Vincere, which was one of the reasons the viewership turned out to be much lower than in the past iteration of the series.

  Grand final was the only match to pass 300K live viewers mark   

IEM Dallas 2023 matches were on the air for 57 hours and collected 7.7 million Hours Watched with an average concurrent audience of 135.5K viewers. The peak was reached during the grand final as the maximum number of people following the game between MOUZ and ENCE was 323.2K people. One of the bigger contributors to grand final viewership was Gaules, who tuned in for a short time. In many ways, it was thanks to him that the tournament was able to overcome the bar of 300,000 concurrent viewers.

Only the grand final managed to overcome the mark of 300K concurrent viewers: the second most popular match of the tournament — ENCE vs. FaZe Clan — was watched by up to 290K people at the same time. It should be noted that the top-5 games of the championship included three matches of MOUZ. 

FaZe Clan became the most popular team of the tournament in all audience metrics. It was significantly ahead of its competitors in terms of total watch time, however, the advantage over competitors from the top-5 was only 3-11% when it comes to comparison by average online. Interestingly, the same teams made it to the top-5 by both HW & AV, some of them only switched places in different ratings.

The list of participants strongly influenced the statistics by language. Due to visa problems, Natus Vincere and Virtus.pro were unable to play at the event, and this year there were three times fewer teams from Brazil, and the only representative of the country, FURIA Esports, could not reach the playoffs.

The only representatives of Eastern Europe and Brazil (Cloud9 and FURIA) failed to reach the playoffs, and thus the share of Russian and Portuguese languages was greatly reduced in the total Hours Watched. Moreover, the Russian language dipped slightly in percentage terms, but the Portuguese dropped heavily.

One should note that not only FURIA Esports and MIBR performed at IEM Dallas 2022, but also Imperial Esports, by far the most popular team in the country. Interestingly, the share of English this time around has grown significantly percentage-wise, but in terms of the Hours Watched, the result was still lower than at the last year's tournament.

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Despite a lot of amazing matches (the decisive map of the semi-finals between ENCE and FaZe Clan was pure gold!), the championship can not be called very successful in terms of spectator statistics. Compared to last year's event, the peak audience has decreased by 25%, and the average online has fallen by as much as 42%.

The tournament became the third most popular among the CS:GO competitions of the Intel Extreme Masters series in 2023, as well as the seventh most popular among all past tournaments of the year in the discipline. Given the abundance of top-tier competitions before the end of the year, it is unlikely that IEM Dallas 2023 will be in the final top-10 CS:GO tournaments of the year in terms of audience.

The next tournament of the Intel Extreme Masters series will take place in Cologne, Germany. The annual event, also part of the Intel Grand Slam series, will be held from July 25 to August 6, with a prize pool of one million dollars.