MPL PH Season 8 – the plummeting viewership after the league’s switch to franchise format

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October 24th marked the end of the eighth season of the Mobile Legends Professional League in the Philippines. The tournament’s result was inferior to the last two seasons. In the new article, Esports Charts shall investigate the reasons for the sudden deterioration of the performance of one of the discipline’s top regions.

MPL PH Season 8 ran from August 27 to October 28. Previously, teams could enter the tournament through qualifiers, but starting from this season the league has acquired a franchise status and now features a limited number of teams – Blacklist International, Bren Esports, Echo, Nexplay EVOS, Onic PH, RSG PH, Smart Omega, and TNC. The league's prize pool has increased from $120K to $150K.

Overall, the tournament was on air for 145 hours and during this time generated 26.5M Hours Watched – a figure that is down 19.8% as compared to the seventh season.

Reasons for the drop in viewership statistics of the league:

1. Several large-scale tournaments were held simultaneously. The Philippine League Final was held concurrently with MPL ID Season 8, the largest Mobile Legends: Bang Bang region with a huge audience. Many fans of the discipline have made a choice in favor of the Indonesian league, as confirmed by its record numbers.

Additionally, being held during the MPL PH was the League of Legends World Championship – Worlds 2021. This could be another cause of the sudden loss of viewer interest in the MPL PH.

2. Fewer broadcasting platforms. Previously, Philippines-based competitions were streamed on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and NimoTV. But this season, the organizers have abandoned the latter platform, although it is very popular in the Asian region (it accounts for more than 30% of the total esports Hours Watched in Indonesia).

3. Fewer broadcast languages. The seventh season was officially broadcasted in Filipino, English, and Indonesian, while the eighth season lost its Indonesian stream, due to which the tournament’s audience clearly diminished. The Philippines also lost part of the English-speaking audience: the Peak Viewers mark for this language decreased by 75% in comparison with the seventh season (decreasing from 1.4M to 593K Peak Viewers).

The most popular match of the tournament was rather predictable – it was a rematch between Blacklist International and the former roster of Execration for the place in the finals. Execration are the winners of MSC 2021 and finalists of MPL PH Season 7. Before the eighth season, the organization announced that it would sell the full roster of the team to another organization – which was the Omega PH Esports.

The encounter between Blacklist International and OMEGA PH Esports was watched by 593K Peak Viewers which is 57% less than the audience of the last season’s finals. The audience of MPL PH declined for the first time in a year and a half. This is the first time that such a drop has occurred since the fourth season.

As a result, MPL PH Season 8 showed worse results in terms of Peak Viewers than the last two seasons. The result in terms of Hours Watched was inferior to the seventh season as well. Note that the eighth season also saw an around 10% worth drop in the Average Viewers compared to the seventh season. However, this indicator did not suffer as much as the Peak Viewers.

Despite the meeting of Blacklist International and Omega PH in the semifinals, Nexplay EVOS became the most popular team of the tournament with 272K Average Viewers. Last season, the same roster was leading by this metric, previously playing under the Nexplay.Solid tag. Blacklist International became the winners of the eighth season in the Philippines. Along with Onic Esports PH, they will represent the Philippines at the M3 World Championship.

MPL PH Season 8 had a lot of circumstances that caused the tournament’s results to plummet compared to the previous seasons. Let's see whether the organizers will be able to fix things during the next tournaments – with the M3 World Championship being the next step in the development of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang esports scene (and taking place in December 2021).

Results of other regional ML:BB leagues:

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