IEM Rio 2023 becomes second-most popular CS:GO tournament this year

Loading

The IEM Rio 2023 ended on Sunday with Team Vitality beating Heroic 2-0 in the Grand Final to clinch the title. It became the second most popular CS:GO event this year, falling behind only the previous tournament in this series, and the third-most watched one.

With its victory, Team Vitality booked its place in the IEM Cologne 2023, where it joins IEM Katowice 2023 winner G2 Esports and ESL Pro League Season 17 champion FaZe Clan among the confirmed participants. The French esports organization also took home $100K of the $250K prize pool, with Heroic pocketing $42K.

  Overall stats and peak matches from the competition   

The IEM Rio 2023 hit a Peak Viewership of 562K during the Semifinals between Heroic and NAVI, with the former appearing in three of the top five popular matches from the tournament. Team Vitality, too, was part of three of the five most-watched games by Peak Viewers.

Interestingly, all the five most-watched matches by PV came during the Playoffs stage. The fact that all the popular teams did well and reached the latter stages of the event was a big help, also aiding it to reach high viewership numbers.

This Brazil event also did 14.45M Hours Watched and 249K Average Viewers over an air time of just under 58 hours. There was a Showmatch as well on the final day, with Team Brazil losing to Team Rest of The World with a score of 8:16, it reached 243K Peak Viewers.

NAVI, perhaps the most popular CS:GO side in the world, was the most watched side by average concurrent viewers at the IEM Rio 2023. Having won the Upper Bracket Final and gained a direct qualification from Group A, fans had high hopes for the Ukrainian side, but it was undone by Heroic in the Semifinals of the Playoffs.

English and Portuguese were the two most popular languages, taking up 45.45% and 30.56% of the overall viewership pie, respectively. It was a huge rise for the latter, which only had 11.50% at the previous competition in the series, the IEM Katowice 2023.

This can be attributed to the fact that Brazilian side FURIA Esports did much better this time, finishing in the fifth-sixth bracket alongside BIG. English also lost out to Portuguese, giving up almost 17% of its share from the Poland competition.

In terms of platforms, there was not much change, with Twitch increasing its already massive share by around 2% to 86.81%, while YouTube fell by roughly the same margin to 13.11%. 

Unsurprisingly, it was gaules, the retired Brazilian CS:GO pro turned content creator, who was the most popular and watched streamer at the IEM Rio 2023. Apart from FURIA Esports’ performance, there was also the matter of two more Brazilian sides, MIBR and Imperial Esports, participating in the competition, bringing in a lot of Portuguese viewers.

The other top channels were all official ESL-related ones. There were also many more channels broadcasting this competition live than Katowice, helping it reach more viewers and increase its stats.

  IEM Rio 2023 was the second most popular CS:GO competition this year (January-April)   

The IEM Rio 2023 did not do numbers anywhere near as good as the IEM Rio Major 2022, but it did end up becoming the second most-watched CS:GO tournament in 2023 based on peak concurrent viewership. Only the IEM Katowice 2023 did better, while only this event and the ESL Pro League Season 17 recorded more watch hours this year.

One common theme among the peak matches of three of the top four most popular events was NAVI’s presence, which is bonafide proof of the side’s popularity globally. With the side missing the next tournament in the series, the IEM Dallas 2023, it will have its work cut out living up to the hype and booking its place at the IEM Cologne 2023.