PGL Major Antwerp 2022: Viewership Stats of Day 1

PGL Major Antwerp 2022 kicked off on May 9 with matches of the Challengers Stage. In short, the favorites of the first stage confirmed their status, the American teams disappointed again, and the event itself showed a record start in terms of viewership activity in the entire history of the series. Esports Charts sums up the results of the first day and tells how many spectators it attracted.

Results of Day 1

During the first two rounds of the Swiss format, Europeans G2 Esports and Team Vitality have confirmed that they are clearly the favorites of the stage, and ZywOo even joined the elite club of players who finished the match deathless at the major: he became the 8th player who managed to achieve that. The victories of the ENCE team were also expected as many experts consider the team one of main contenders for victory in the entire tournament. The team confidently won against 9z and Outsiders, and now it has to beat G2 Esports to qualify for the next round.

The American teams have not been able to show a decent result yet, as both Complexity Gaming & Team Liquid were crushed by European teams in the first games: NA squads managed to win only 7 rounds together against Vitality & G2. What’s even more disappointing is that the legendary Team Liquid is one step away from leaving Major as it lost two of the opening matches.

Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, is rooting for local team Bad News Eagles, which ended day one with 1:1 score

Brazilian teams faced the same difficulties. Imperial e-Sports, the team with the highest average age of 28,4 years, failed to win versus the team with lowest average age of 20,7 years — Team Spirit. However, both Brazilian squads are not out of competition yet, as MIBR & Imperial finished the day wit 1:1 score.

A small sensation was forZe Es, the Russians finished the day with two victories in the bag. Even though the draw of opponents was on their side, the team still performed quite impressive & is now one step away from making it to the next stage. However, the next opponent will be very tough: Vitality looks really strong right now.

Viewership Statistics of Day 1

In terms of viewership, PGL Major Antwerp 2022 showed the best start in the history of the series. At its peak, the first day attracted over 704K viewers, the vast majority of whom watched the game between G2 Esports and Team Spirit (Complexity Gaming and IHC Esports game was live as well). Previously, no major attracted more than 700K viewers on the first day: the previous record belonged to PGL Major Stockholm with 668K viewers at the peak.

Compared to the last major, all the main broadcast languages (English and Portuguese) improved their performance, amassing more viewers at the peak than the first day of the event in Stockholm. On the contrary Russian broadcasts (which is the 3rd popular language in CS:GO) lost 30% of its Peak Audience. Mainly thanks to community casting, the contribution of the Spanish language grew especially strongly: at the peak of the broadcast, it reached 75.2 thousand viewers, which is only a few people less than on Russian-language streams.

Among the unofficial broadcasts, the Argentine streamer Gancho showed the biggest success. He actively covered the matches of the 9z team: his average viewers count exceeded 20K people, and at its peak he reached 44.8K people. The top three community casters also included another Argentine creator forg1 and xhocii, the official caster of the Bad News Eagles club.

Traditionally, Valve also launched an English-language broadcast on the Steam.TV service that is integrated both into the CS page on Steam and in the game client. This stream, like last year, reached the top 3 most popular ones on the first day (second only to Gaules and the main PGL broadcast) in terms of peak and average audience. However, the overall figures were lower than at the tournament in Stockholm: the peak declined by 25%, and the average number of viewers decreased by 22%.

Concerning the matches, the most popular was the battle of G2 Esports against Team Spirit with 625.5K concurrent viewers, which is 38% more than the peak viewers of the second most popular game where MIBR faced Outsiders. The top 5 also included the G2 game against Team Liquid, as well as two matches of veterans of the Brazilian scene from Imperial — against Team Spirit and Liquid.

Comparison of the first day of the major with a similar top event in Valorant (VCT 2022 Stage 1 Masters) shows that the CS:GO tournament is significantly superior to its competitor in all major metrics. Even taking into account the fact that several games are being played simultaneously at the major, particular matches gathered more viewers than at Reykjavik: Masters. In viewership comparison, the Average Viewers PGL Major Antwerp was ahead of VCT 2022 Stage 1 Masters by 34%, and in terms of Peak Viewers — by almost 37%.