IEM Katowice 2023 falling far behind last year's tournament by viewership
IEM Katowice 2023 (CS:GO) ended on February 12 in Poland. 24 strongest teams in the world competed for the title and a share of a million-dollar prize pool. The tournament was full of surprises and unexpected results, but it fell behind last year's championship in terms of viewership. Esports Charts tells you why there were fewer people watching the broadcasts than at IEM Katowice 2022.
Tournament Results
IEM Katowice 2023 had three stages: first, the Play-In stage, determined the full Group Stage lineup, and then six Playoff slots were contested.
The main highlight of the Play-In stage was the elimination of all three Brazilian teams: MIBR, FURIA Esports, and paiN Gaming failed to reach the Group Stage. In Group A, the biggest surprise was Cloud9's loss to the Mongolian team IHC Esports in an elimination match. As for other teams, G2 Esports made their first serious claim to the championship, beating FaZe Clan and Natus Vincere one by one. Group B also had its surprises: the reigning champions of the Major, Outsiders, had to qualify for the Playoffs via the lower bracket as the team lost to Fnatic in the first round.
Team Liquid, Team Vitality, Natus Vincere and Outsiders made it to the first round of the Playoffs after the matches in the Groups, and G2 Esports and Heroic went straight into the Semifinals, as they had the best result in their respective Groups. In the end, G2 Esports and Heroic faced off in the Grand Final of the tournament: Nikola NiKo Kovač's team won 3:1, earning $400K and a slot at IEM Cologne 2023.
It is interesting that G2 Esports has reached the finals of the IEM three times previously. The team was one step away from winning IEM Katowice 2022, IEM Cologne 2021 and IEM Katowice 2022, but was twice knocked out by Natus Vincere and once lost the title to FaZe Clan.
Viewership Statistics
IEM Katowice 2023 matches accumulated 23.3 million Hours Watched, and the Average Viewers number was 234K. The Grand Final between Heroic and G2 Esports was the most popular match of the tournament, attracting 712.5K Peak Viewers. The latter team also surpassed all other participants by Hours Watched (6 million) and Average Viewers at matches (355.2K people).
English became the most popular language of the tournament, it got 62.3% of the total Hours Watched and reached 442.9K Peak Viewers. Russian (14.1% of the HW) and Portuguese (11.6% of the HW) are also in the Top 3 languages. In total, the tournament was covered on more than 70 channels. About 84.6% of the total Hours Watched were accumulated on Twitch.
Comparison with Previous Tournaments
Comparison of major CS:GO tournaments — late 2022 / early 2023
IEM Katowice 2023 has become the second most popular CS:GO tournament in the last six months. It is second only to IEM Rio Major 2022, held in November 2022. At the same time, the Polish tournament surpassed ESL Pro League Season 16 and several BLAST Series tournaments, including the seasonal championships and last year's World Finals, in terms of Peak Viewers.
Taking a longer-distance view, IEM Katowice 2023 fell far behind IEM Katowice 2022 by every metric. For example, the PV number decreased by 36.5%, and the AV number decreased by 29.5%, all because all the main broadcast languages, including English (-28.5%) and Russian (-38%), suffered a decline.
In 2023, ESL's contract with Twitch for exclusive broadcasts of IEM matches expired. The tournament operator began making official streams on YouTube. At IEM Katowice 2023, the PV number of the ESL CS channel on the new platform was nearly 107K, but it did not help surpass the last tournament.
What are the reasons for the decline in viewership? One of them is popularity of the finalists. Last year, it was FaZe Clan that played against G2 Esports, one of the most well-known organizations in esports with more than 33 million followers on social networks. This year, the finals saw the game between G2 Esports and Heroic, and the Danish team is surely not as popular as FaZe: Heroic had one of the lowest rates in the Group Stage by the AV number at the matches, the team took 12 place out of 16.
IEM Katowice 2023 teams popularity — ranking by followers in social networks
IEM Katowice 2023 saw the Peak Viewers in the Vietnamese language drop from 155.3K to 18.8K viewers, i.e. more than eight times. This happened because IEM Katowice 2022 was broadcast on NimoTV, a platform popular with Vietnamese viewers. In addition, NimoTV players had automatic playback of broadcasts, so that random viewers (who did not stay on broadcast) often got there. During IEM Katowice 2023, there were no broadcasts on NimoTV as the service was virtually shut down in the middle of 2022 due to a lack of funds. Since then, the Vietnamese broadcasts are available on YouTube.
Portuguese also saw its Peak Viewers number drop from 141K to 87K. As we wrote in one of our latest reviews, the main reason for the decline here is the poor performance of the Brazilian teams. They all dropped out before the start of the Group Stage. Brazilian viewers are the backbone of Portuguese-language broadcasts, and most of them only watch tournaments when they have a chance to cheer for their teams.
The win at IEM Katowice 2023 was G2 Esports' second major success in the last couple of months. Earlier, the European team won BLAST Premier: World Final 2022, where it took home $500K. The next tournament for the team will be ESL Pro League Season 17, scheduled from February 22 to March 26 in Malta.
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