The most popular teams of the M3 World Championship (bonus: interview with NAVI)

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December 19 marked the end of the M3 World Championship in Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. The tournament attracted 3.1M Peak Viewers, which was a record for the discipline. Earlier, Esports Charts overviewed the overall results of the tournament, and in this article, we will tell you about the most popular teams of the event. We also spoke with Natus Vincere, the team that reached the seventh spot in the tournament. For them, this is the highest achievement throughout three tournaments in the World Championship series.

Disclaimer: The ranking of the most popular teams is based on the Average Viewers of the matches.

The most popular team of the tournament was the Indonesian team RRQ Hoshi with 1.4M Average Viewers. The team achieved such high results despite only taking the 6th spot in the tournament. Indonesian fans make up the largest segment of the audience of Mobile Legends competitions, with the game being most popular in Indonesia of all Southeast Asian countries.

The second spot belongs to the winners of the tournament – the Filipino Blacklist International team. The matches with the team’s participation gathered 932K Average Viewers. BI also has the most Hours Watched among the tournament’s participants, but this is primarily because they’ve participated in more matches than most of the tournament participants.

The third and fourth spots belong to the teams of the Onic Esports organization, namely, their rosters from the Philippines and Indonesia. This year, Onic is holding a number of achievements: the Indonesian team took the first spot at MPL ID Season 8, and the Filipinos reached the final of the M3 World Championship.

The fifth spot was taken by the TODAK team from Malaysia, which gathered 698K Average Viewers. They finished sixth in the tournament and were the only representatives of the region in the playoffs, given that Team SMG was eliminated at the very beginning of the playoffs.

BTK and Natus Vincere are the teams that stood out the most at the M3 World Championship. BloodThirstyKings represented North America and played at a tournament of this level for the first time. The lack of MPL in the region caused BTK to be viewed as the tournament’s outsider. However, the team finished third in the competition and became the sixth most popular team in the M3 World Championship.

In November, Natus Vincere signed the Deus Vult team. Before M3, the team members competed in the first two World Championships, but never rose above the twelfth spot. This year marked a breakthrough for the CIS region, because NAVI took 7th spot in the tournament, while the Russian-language broadcast set a new all-time record of 16K Peak Viewers!

We spoke with Stanislav "SAWO" Reshniak, captain of Natus Vincere Mobile Legends. Stanislav said that the team was happy with the format of the tournament. When it came to defeating TODAK, the team was a little bit short of everything: "at times we were short of discipline, at times of concentration, at times of faith, and at times of time itself."

According to Stanislav, mobile gaming in the CIS is quite promising, as more and more people are trying mobile games due to their convenience and accessibility. NAVI themselves tried their hand not only at ML:BB, but also at PUBGM, Free Fire, and Brawl Stars.

Esports Charts also talked with Alexey "xaoc" Kucherov, COO of Natus Vincere. We asked why the organization decided to sign a roster dedicated to Mobile Legends in particular:

“We liked the approach and openness of the Moonton representatives, who provide the opportunities to discuss the future of the discipline, learn important details and plan mutually beneficial cooperation. We had an excellent roster in the region: the long-time reigning champions with whom we managed to agree to work together. This encouraged us to take an even closer look at the discipline.”

Alexey Kucherov, Chief Operating Officer, NAVI

We also asked Kucherov whether the club was going to sign a roster for another popular mobile MOBA – Arena of Valor. He replied that the club was not really choosing between ML:BB and AoV, as: "One does not exclude the other." Perhaps in the future, we will see another mobile roster from the “born to win”?

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