MSI 2022 results: top teams, viewership records and audience overlap with Dota 2 and CS:GO Majors

Loading

The recent Mid-Season Invitational 2022 drew nearly 2.2 million Peak Viewers at the Grand final between Royal Never Give Up and T1, which set a series record and became the fourth best result in the discipline. But these are not all of the tournament's interesting statistics. In a new article, Esports Charts presents the most popular teams and other viewership records of MSI 2022, as well as an overlap of the event's final day audience with the finals of the Dota 2 and CS:GO Majors.

Most Popular Teams

The most popular MSI 2022 team is T1. The Korean team's matches were watched by more than 885.6K Average Viewers. The games of Royal Never Give Up, the champion, had 17.5% fewer Average Viewers. Other Top-5 teams in the tournament by this metric are G2 Esports, Saigon Buffalo and DetonatioN FocusMe, which left the event in the group stage. Evil Geniuses, the playoff participant, is only the 8th most popular team, after even Team Aze and PSG Talon, that didn’t make it to the final stage.

Comparison with Previous Tournaments of the Series

The audience of Mid-Season Invitational 2022 is increasing every year, and that is certainly an achievement for a discipline as old as LoL. In 2017, the number of Peak Viewers was 916.6K, but in 2022, that number has more than doubled. At the same time, the situation with Hours Watched is less clear. The increase was visible in 2019 and 2021, but in 2022 the metric went down by 27%.

Viewership Records

The most popular languages of MSI 2022 broadcasts are Korean and English. During the Grand final, they drew 684K and 567K Peak Viewers, respectively, which has become the best result in the Mid-Season Invitational history. Chinese, French, and Czech broadcasts also managed to renew their Peak Viewers records. The latter two almost doubled their results.

It is noteworthy that the last record of English broadcasts was set 5 years ago, at MSI 2017, and was refreshed during the finals, which had neither American nor European teams.

Records for Peak Viewers have been refreshed on all major MSI broadcast platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, AfreecaTV, and Facebook Gaming. But whereas most of them reached their PV during the Grand Final, Facebook Gaming did it on the very first day of the event.

MSI 2022, PGL Major and ESL Major Finals Audience Overlap

May was a great occasion for eSports fans as two major CS:GO and Dota 2 tournaments were held simultaneously with MSI 2022. PGL Major Antwerp 2022 and ESL One Stockholm Major 2022 ended on May 22, while the LoL Championship ended a week later.

Based on our analysis of Riot Games, PGL and ESL_DOTA2 Twitch channels audiences during the Grand final, we found that 7% of MSI viewers were also interested in the PGL Major Antwerp final, while 9% of the CS:GO major viewers followed the Mid-Season Invitational final.

The total audience of Valve and Riot Games MOBA games was significantly smaller. The Mid-Season Invitational final drew 3% of Dota 2 main event viewers, while the ESL One Stockholm Major final was followed by 4% of the MSI audience.

These results demonstrate that viewers of one MOBA will be much more interested in following a discipline in a different genre than a rival MOBA. Thus, the audience interested in two top disciplines within the same genre is not very large, and the share of viewers who followed the finals of the three tournaments mentioned above was even smaller.