M4 World Championship recap — one of the most popular tournaments in the history of esports
On January 15, the M4 World Championship, the main tournament of the year in Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, ended. The final did not become the most popular match of the championship, but the event achieved many other records. Read the main insights from the competition's statistics in the new Esports Charts article.
All the best teams from all over the world took part in the M4 World Championship. In addition to the winners and prize-winners of the MPL tournaments, teams from the USA, Myanmar, Vietnam, Turkey and the Middle East also entered the main stage through the qualifying events.
In the final of the tournament, two teams from the Philippines met, just as in the previous year. Blacklist International had every chance to become a two-time champion of the series, but it was stopped by compatriots from ECHO. The game ended with a score of 4:0, and ECHO earned $300K in addition to the championship title.
In nearly 100 hours of airtime, the M4 World Championship has accumulated over 80.1 million Hours Watched with an average audience of 806K concurrent viewers. Peak online reached 4.2 million people during the upper bracket semi-finals, where the reigning world champions from Blacklist met the most popular ML:BB team in the world, RRQ Hoshi.
It is interesting that the grand final was only the third most popular match of the tournament, at its peak it scored a little more than 3 million viewers. In addition to the mentioned BI vs. RRQ Hoshi match, the lower bracket final also drew more viewers than the final game of the event: 3.1 million viewers watched ECHO knocking RRQ Hoshi out of the tournament.
It is worth noting that M4 turned out to be many times more popular than the last tournament in the series in terms of all indicators of viewer activity. The total Hours Watched increased by 27%, the peak viewership increased by 33%, and the average broadcast audience grew by 200,000 people (+33%). In many ways, the event achieved significant audience success due to the increase in the number of broadcast channels: compared to last year, they almost doubled, as the total number approached 300.
The M4 World Championship has turned out to be one of the most popular tournaments in the history of esports if you do not take into account the Chinese audience. The event took third place in terms of peak audience, behind only Worlds 2022 and FFWS 2021 Singapore.
In terms of maximum simultaneous audience, M4 outperformed such major events as The International series and Worlds series competitions in 2019-2021. Thus, the top five most popular events now include two mobile esports tournaments at once. And considering the growth of ML:BB as a whole, it is likely that this trend will continue in the new year.
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