IESF’s ML:BB World Championship 2023 sets new records for the event series surrounded by controversies

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The International Esports Federation returned to Romania to host its 15th World Championship esports event. The IESF is a Korean non-profit organisation who have been trying to legitimise esports as sporting events for over a decade. After hosting IESF World Championship 2013 in Bucharest, they returned to Romania ten years later to the city of Iași for their 15th year of events. 

2023 saw the exact same six events as 2022 return again: CS:GO, Dota 2, Tekken 7, eFootball, PUBG Mobile, and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. ML:BB became a discipline featured at the World Championship for the first time last year and it quickly took over the event as their most popular discipline. In 2022, the ML:BB event fell just short of 2M hours of watch time; were they able to break this milestone this time?

IESF World Championship Overall Viewership

Looking at all seven events hosted by the IESF this year, six disciplines and a women’s CS:GO event, the event brought in 5.2M Hours Watched in total, the most in the series’ history. Over 700K peak concurrent viewers also marks another record for the series, as the ML:BB Grand Final match between Indonesia and the Philippines was the most popular match of any IESF event.

Overall, the World Championship received 15.6K average concurrent viewers throughout its run, however, this figure is slightly thrown off due to the top-heavy nature of the event’s viewership. Of all seven events hosted this year, only the ML:BB tournament received more than 15.6K Average Viewers, and the second-best tournament in Average Viewers was the PUBG Mobile event, which received 5.7K AV.

  IESF World Championship 2023 events, ranked per Peak Viewers  

Of the total 5.2M Hours Watched for the entire event, ML:BB was responsible for over 90% of this watch time. Let’s take a look at the statistics for solely the ML:BB event of this year’s World Championship.

ML:BB IESF World Championship Viewership

As mentioned, the Grand Final match between Indonesia and the Philippines was the most popular match of the event, and it was not close. Viewership almost doubled coming from the Egypt-Indonesia match into the Grand Finals, and the Philippines were ultimately victorious with a 3-1 victory over Indonesia. 

Viewership was high for the event, especially that which came from Indonesian audiences. Indonesian has quickly taken over the IESF to become one of the most popular languages of the entire event due to the influence of ML:BB. This viewership isn’t only confined to the ML:BB event: the Dota 2 event of the IESF WC 2023 received low viewership compared to last year, but Indonesian viewership was much higher than normally expected for a Dota 2 event. Likely due to both the IESF being held in Indonesia last year and the inclusion of an ML:BB event, Indonesian viewership was on a high note for a lot of the events.

For our PRO subscribers, take a look at the most popular broadcasters who covered the ML:BB event of the IESF World Championship 2023.

Looking at the most-watched channels of the event, we can see exactly how and why the IESF is receiving the viewership it is for the ML:BB events. Without the support of these third-party channels, it's highly unlikely that the event would be able to reach the viewership it did.

Although IESF’s ML:BB event was their most popular event ever hosted, it was just another event for the ML:BB esports ecosystem. The IESF World Championship event does not even rank within the top 10 most-watched events of 2023, unable to compete with the MPL leagues. Even when we filter the tournaments to only include third-party event organisers, the IESF WC 2023 ranks only third per Hours Watched for 2023.

Whilst Indonesian viewership was on a high, other languages experienced lows. Ukrainian viewership was abnormally low for disciplines like CS:GO and Dota 2, likely due to the fact that the Ukrainian teams for these events withdrew themselves from the tournaments because of IESF’s decision to allow Russian players to compete under a Russian flag. Both in CS:GO and Dota 2, the Ukrainian teams were scheduled to play in the Playoffs stage before removing themselves from the events. 

As mentioned, the Dota 2 event received low viewership compared to the previous year — likely due to a lack of the huge Indonesian support the event received last year, so let’s now look at a discipline that did experience growth for 2023: CS:GO.

CS:GO IESF World Championship Viewership

Looking at the statistics for both the IESF World Championship CS:GO event and the Female World Championship for this year, we can see both events experienced substantial growth coming into this year. 

As expected for an IESF event, the CS:GO World Championship received high viewership from Romanian audiences as fans supported the local event. Community casters were out in full force for both the WC and Female WC events; jaxiTV, a Romanian CS:GO professional and caster, streamed the WC event to his YouTube Live stream and was one of the most-watched streamers of the entire event. Thanks to his streams and Romanian community support, Team Romania’s Round of 12 2-1 victory against the Czech Republic was the most popular match of the entire event. 

For the female event, forg1, a CS:GO professional player, was the main community caster for the tournament on Twitch. Forg1 is an Argentinian streamer and he supported Team Argentina with his casts as they progressed all the way to the Grand Finals. Forg1 reached 11K Peak Viewers during the finals with Argentinan fans out to support their national women’s team, but ultimately they fell against Team Netherlands, who won the event.

Despite the downturn for the CS:GO WC Airtime compared to last year’s event, viewership was on the rise overall and CS:GO was still one of the longest-broadcasted tournaments of the event. Only the Dota 2 event was live for longer, with over 64 hours of Airtime recorded.

Overall Viewership Statistics without ML:BB

Looking at the statistics for the event without including the ML:BB event, metrics like Average Viewers become much more accurate for the event. Of the six remaining events for the IESF WC 2023, Tekken and eFootball measured far below the average for concurrent viewers, and the Female CS:GO World Championship measured just slightly below the average.

PUBG Mobile was the highest event in terms of Average Viewers without ML:BB, having achieved 5.7K AV throughout its 17-hour event. Despite Dota 2 registering the highest Peak Viewers, the event’s viewership was still disappointing compared to last year. Apart from Dota 2, the only other two events not to grow in viewership coming into 2022 were the Tekken and eFootball events for the IESF.

IESF overall experienced another successful year of esports tournaments. ML:BB reached new peaks for the event but ultimately was not able to compete with other established third-party event organisers when it came to watch time. Not only a source of inflation for their viewership statistics, the inclusion of ML:BB and the decision to host last year’s IESF World Championship in Indonesia has put IESF on the map for Indonesian audiences, which are one of the fastest-growing and largest audiences in esports at the moment. 

Events like CS:GO and PUBG Mobile both experienced good growth coming into 2022, but Dota 2 struggled to replicate the local support it received compared to last year, where Indonesian viewership completely dominated the event. Despite the controversies of this year, the IESF is continuing to grow and become more respected as an international event organisation for various esports disciplines.