IEM Katowice 2025 opens to much higher watch time thanks to expanded format and female team
IEM Katowice 2025 has returned Counter-Strike to Poland. The legendary event series kicked off its newest edition with the Play-In stage, featuring the top ranked teams from Valve’s global leaderboards. At first glance, the opening day of matches has been a wild success, with the series recording its highest opening viewership since 2020.
On the opening day, FURIA Esports’ game against the female Imperial Valkyries team was the most popular game, reaching just under 400,000 concurrent viewers. Notably, this peak is roughly 70,000 concurrent viewers higher than the opening day peak for the 2024 Katowice tournament. Similar to the recent BLAST Premier Bounty Season 1 2025, the feature of a female squad for the event’s opening stages has driven massive viewership, attention, and media coverage to the Katowice-based tournament.
In total, the opening day for IEM Katowice 2025 received 412,700 Peak Viewers. This peak was reached during FURIA’s game against the female squad, which overlapped with Wildcards’ game against BIG. While many other matches were held on the opening day, none came close to the viewership enjoyed by the top match.
Nevertheless, the other matches and new expanded format of the event schedule saw the opening day live for hours and hours, steadily generating viewership throughout. In total, the opening day of the Play-in was able to host eight different matches during 12 hours of broadcasting time.
Across this half-day of broadcasting, the event received 2.68M Hours Watched, an increase of roughly 57% compared to last year’s Katowice opening day. While average viewership was only slightly higher than last year, watch time increased dramatically. This was due to the event organizers deciding to change the Play-in stage to best-of-three matches, compared to last year when they were only best-of-ones. Crucially, broadcasting time increased for this year without having a negative effect on average viewership.
Across all major metrics, the opening day for the 2025 tournament showed positive dynamics. English, Russian, and Portuguese-speaking audiences were all crucial in recording the strong peaks at the event so far, and these audiences will likely continue to drive viewership for this Counter-Strike event. YouTube-based viewership also expanded significantly for this year, with Brazilian viewers preferring this platform slightly over Twitch.
Taking both the opening and second day of the Play-into account, some metrics calmed down. Portuguese and Russian peaks were lower than last year’s opening couple of days, but English-language viewership remains strong. Also, the clear growth of YouTube Gaming esports broadcasts for Counter-Strike was undeniable.
As it stands, the new-expanded format of the Play-in is likely to bring more and more watch time to the tournament. IEM Katowice is often one of the most popular Counter-Strike tournaments of the year. The legendary event series often records some of the highest third-party event viewership of the year, second only to Majors and other world-class tournaments. Keep an eye on the updating viewership statistics for the IEM Katowice 2024, it may be able to dethrone the BLAST Premier Bounty Season 1 2025 as the early most popular tournament of the year.
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