The debut of the women's team at BLAST Premier against NAVI reached almost half a million concurrent viewers

Loading

At the ongoing BLAST Premier Bounty Season 1 2025, Imperial’s female squad was invited to the event through Valve’s ranking system, which is largely based on prize money won. BLAST’s new Bounty format allowed Imperial Valkyries to choose their first opponent, and they picked the Major-winning squad NAVI. The showdown between the best of Counter-Strike’s main and dedicated female scenes was highly anticipated, ultimately receiving almost 500,000 concurrent viewers and setting a record for female esports on PC.

BLAST’s new format at Bounty events sees the bracket reseeded after each round of matches: the lower-seeded teams are allowed to choose their opponents from the higher-end of the bracket. This format has the potential for teams themselves to drive viewership with their picks, as we have already seen with Imperial Valkyrie’s game against NAVI.

Viewership for NAVI’s game against Imperial’s female squad was immediately higher than any other match at the event so far. The most popular games of the event so far had received roughly 300,000 concurrent viewers at peak; Imperial Valkyries’ debut at the BLAST Bounty surpassed 300,000 viewers only ten minutes into the game. Crucially for viewership, NAVI were not able to roll over the female squad. 

Imperial’s female team secured 5 rounds against NAVI in the first half of Ancient, and they headed in to the second half with a chance of victory still palpable for the Brazilian organization. Ultimately, NAVI would convert their advantage to a 13:7 win, but the game had gone on long enough to record 490,804 Peak Viewers (PV). Viewership for the second map was still high, but the final moments on Ancient were the cause of the peak. 

With this peak viewership, the game exceeded the previous most popular female esports event on PC, the VCT 2024: Game Changers Championship. The event's finals reached 464,695 PV, which was by far the highest peak viewership female esports on PC has seen. Imperial Valkyrie's match against NAVI pushed the limits of female esports even further, and 2025 could not have started better for the female side of the esports industry. 

Although Imperial’s squad enjoyed massive viewership for their debut, most viewership came from outside their organization’s home of Brazil. Most of the female squad is from Eastern Europe, and along with NAVI, a large audience of Russian-speaking Counter-Strike fans tuned in for the match. International English-language viewership was also high, but Portuguese-speaking fans were less interested. Nevertheless, Portuguese was still the third-most-popular language for broadcasts, ahead of Ukrainian and Polish. 

In total, the first three days of the Play-In have received 5.25M Hours Watched so far. Generally, viewership for the event has been strong overall. The early Play-In stage of the BLAST Premier Bounty Season 1 has received stronger Peak Viewers than the likes of BLAST Premier: Fall Groups 2024, and numbers will likely only rise for the tournament as the stakes rise.

Aside from the total record-breaking peak viewership, the match also broke several other records for female esports on PC. A new Russian-language record, Twitch total peak record, and YouTube Gaming total peak record are just some of the ground-breaking achievements of this game.  

Imperial Valkyries recent choice to face NAVI in the first round of matches was a perfect example of why BLAST’s new Bounty system has massive potential to drive viewership towards their events. As the round-of-32 finishes up, the following round begins on January 18 and will decide which teams progress to the main event. The inaugural season of BLAST Bounty has already shown potential, and the following stages of the season will likely host some of the most popular Counter-Strike matches of Q1 2025.