CS:GO, Valorant, or Call of Duty? Popular shooter tournament comparison

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The second half of 2022 saw several large-scale international tournaments in various popular shooters, including the Valorant World Championship and the CS:GO Major. The competition in the genre is very high, so we have decided to compare the tournaments to each other and find out how much their audiences overlap.

It is important to note that these are not the most popular tournaments of the year in their disciplines, but rather the final tournaments of the official 2022 seasons. Whereas VALORANT Championship 2022 set a new record for audience reach, IEM Rio Major 2022, Six Jönköping Major 2022 and Free Fire World Series 2022 did not have the best results in their disciplines in 2022. 

Comparison of Tournaments by Basic Metrics

Most popular shooter tournaments in the second half of 2022

IEM Rio Major 2022 and Valorant Champions 2022 stand out particularly strongly from all the championships. They surpass the other events by several times in terms of key metrics. The CS:GO championship in Brazil was the best by total Hours Watched (69.5 million) and Average Viewers (548K), while the Valorant Championship surpassed others by Peak Viewers (1.5 million) and the number of Unique Authorized Viewers on Twitch (5.4 million). 

Halo World Championship 2022 got the fewest Hours Watched (1.9 million), although it beat Six Jönköping Major 2022 by the number of viewers. Free Fire World Series 2022 Bangkok also showed an extremely low result, becoming the most unpopular tournament of the World Series (read more about the results of the tournament here). 

Audience Overlap

The chart shows only tournaments that had official Twitch streams. There is no data on Overwatch League and Call of Duty League as these championships were broadcast exclusively on YouTube.

Almost 40% of Six Jönköping Major 2022 viewers also watched the IEM Rio Major 2022 — the highest overlap among the analyzed events. The reason is that Rainbow Six Siege is very popular in Brazil (not comparable to CS:GO, but still). There are also many strong R6 players in the country, playing for big-name teams such as FaZe Clan, Team Liquid, and other organizations. At the same time, the CS:GO audience paid attention only to the Valorant championship and hardly watched the other tournaments.  

Apex Legends and Halo tournaments viewers were more interested in Valorant Champions 2022 than CS:GO major. It is important to keep in mind that the main audience of Apex Legends and Halo is in the USA, and local fans were probably more interested in watching the American team OpTic Gaming in the Valorant World Championship final than watching the extremely modest result of American e-athletes in Rio, where the best result was shown by Team Liquid, which took only 9-11th place. 

Free Fire World Series 2022 showed the lowest percentage of audience overlap with other tournaments. This is quite understandable because it is the only tournament in the list, where the discipline was a mobile title. It is important to note that Free Fire World Series 2022 Bangkok had low audience reach on Twitch as it is not the most popular platform for mobile esports.

Halo, Call of Duty and Overwatch championships were mostly watched by English-speaking viewers — the official streams in that language accounted for 97.16%, 99.9% and 87.63% of total Hours Watched, respectively. As we have mentioned above, these tournaments are held in the U.S. and target mostly local fans. 

Free Fire World Series 2022 Bangkok, however, was the only one of these events, where the most popular broadcast language was not English, but Spanish — it accounted for 30.9% of the total Hours Watched. Portuguese-language streams are in second place, accounting for almost 20% of total HW. English accounted for only 2.5% of total HW and peaked at only 2K Peak Viewers.

It is also important to mention the broadcasts in Japanese, which attracted a large audience at Valorant (20.89%), Apex Legends (18.65%) and Rainbow Six Siege (6.17%) tournaments. Interest in shooters now outpaces any other genre in Japan.

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Among the disciplines listed, the last major LAN tournaments in 2022 will be BLAST Premier: World Final 2022 in Abu Dhabi, as well as Call of Duty League 2023: Stage 1 Major and CODM World Championship 2022 in Raleigh. You can stay up to date with them in the coverage section on Esports Charts.