M5 World Championship reached new MLBB esports record despite RRQ absence

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The M5 World Championship ended on December 17 at the Rizal Memorial Coliseum in Manila, with a home side coming out on top and creating history. This also helped it become one of the most popular esports events ever and reach number one in this metric among the five editions held in the series so far.

After almost a month of action, it came down to sides from the two most followed regions in the sport, The Philippines and Indonesia, to decide who would walk out as the world champion. A tense Grand Final was finally sealed 4:3 as Bren Esports sneaked past ONIC Esports to send a boisterous and partisan crowd back home happy.

Having become the first team to claim two M-series titles after clinching the 2021 edition, Bren Esports took home a mammoth $300K. The runner-up, meanwhile, got richer by $120K, while the third-placed Blacklist International, who made it two Filipinos on the podium, pocketed $80K out of a total prize pool of $900,000.

  Most popular matches and basic stats from the recent M5 World Championship   

The M5 World Championship recorded 5.06M Peak Viewers during the summit clash, with both finalists only losing one game each during the entire competition, ironically to each other. Their other meeting came in the Upper Bracket Final, which the Indonesian giant easily won 3:0 to send its opponent to the Lower Bracket Final for an all-Filipino clash against Blacklist International.

AP.Bren dominated that battle 3:0 and went on to avenge its earlier loss and clinch arguably the most coveted trophy in global mobile esports today. As a result, both clashes between the top two made it to the list of top five most popular games, with ONIC Esports' clash with Blacklist International in the Upper Bracket Quarterfinal — which the former edged 3:2 — coming in third.

The two finalists were the only sides with multiple entries on the above table, showing just how much in demand they were. This was especially true when keeping in mind the absence of RRQ, the most popular team in the discipline, who failed to qualify for the most important event on the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang calendar. Their performances helped it register 72.1M Hours Watched and 475.2K Average Viewers over around 152 hours of airtime.

Readers won't be surprised to know which name topped the tournament's most popular side leaderboard, holding a 24.4% lead over the next-best side. In fact, the top two are also the same when it comes to watch time, with no other side coming close to their stats. It was a similar case when it comes to language and platform, as Indonesian and YouTube each notched over half of the Hours Watched chart.

Moving to some more records shattered, Tiktok (1.1M PV) reached a new peak concurrent viewership across all esports competitions, which is no mean task when there is so much competition and so many tournaments happening every month. Two more names to complete this milestone were Indonesian, with 3.2M PV, and Khmer (146K PV), proving once again why MLBB retains so much importance in the South Asian market.

Like likes of Twitch (12.1K PV), YouTube (3.2M PV), and English (500K PV) also saw new marks reached for this series. Special mention must also go to the likes of Russian, Spanish, Mongolian, Chinese, and Tamil, which all saw new highs during this landmark MLBB competition.

Despite the non-participation of RRQ this year, which led to the belief that the M5 World Championship would not meet the usual viewership standards, it beat all previous iterations in this series in terms of popularity. Thanks to the stories of AP.Bren and ONIC Esports, it has become the number one MLBB event by peak viewership and the first one to cross 5M PV.

  Some of the main records broken at the M5 World Championship   

It would not be a stretch to now claim that with how well things are going for the world tournaments, setting the overall peak online viewership PV record for mobile esports is not that far away. Currently, the record is held by the Free Fire World Series 2021 Singapore with 5.4M PV, around 400K more than what the M5 World Championship set.

The latter side had the whole of Indonesia, and some of the game's wider community, on its side as it was chasing the unthinkable. Having already won the two MPL titles and the MSC this year, it needed to notch the world title to become the first-ever team to do the Grand Slam in the discipline. That is why its journey from the first game right until the last moments of the Grand Final became almost a must-watch, and while it may not have succeeded in making history, ONIC Esports has forged a legacy that will be hard to match in the coming years.

  2023 has contributed three entries to the list of most popular esports competitions of all time   

AP.Bren, meanwhile, completed a fairytale journey in front of adoring home fans to become the sport's only two-time world champion. Having lost earlier, the summit clash became not only about revenge or the glittering crown but also about regional supremacy between the two most followed markets in MLBB, and that brought in lots of eyeballs during its fantastic main event victory.

All these factors also ensured that the M5 World Championship became the seventh-most viewed MLBB competition ever. Having shown so much promise this year, this mega event has brought the year to a great end for the sport, and fans will wait with bated breath to see what is in store for them come 2024, but for now, they can bask in the shadow of such a historic moment.