PMGC 2021 Finals overview — why didn't the tournament draw many viewers?

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The final tournament of the 2021 PUBG Mobile esports season ended last weekend. The PMGC 2021 Finals featured top teams from China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Europe. The tournament had a record $3.49 million prize pool for the discipline (1.5 times more compared to the last world championship). However, the tournament still showed quite modest viewership in comparison with the previous event of the series. Esports Charts breaks down the reasons why that happened.

The last tournament in the series PUBG Mobile Global Championship Season 0 is one of the most watched esports tournaments. The game's publisher actively promoted it, and also fostered the NimoTV broadcasts in the game client: all PUBG Mobile players received push notifications about the start of the broadcasts during the finals, which also included info on in-game gifts that were offered for watching the championship. Thanks to this, the competition managed to reach an incredible Peak Viewers number of 3.8 million spectators. However, still more than 1.4 million Peak Viewers watched the event on the final day, if we exclude the in-game viewers. Compared to this, the statistics for the final days of the PMGC 2021 were extremely modest.

The Chinese team Nova Esports won the PMGC 2021; it was the only squad to score more than 200 points at the end of 18 rounds. The team won over $1.5 million for first place. It should be mentioned that the remaining places in the top 4 went to teams from Europe and the Middle East. NAVI (Russia) took second place, Nigma Galaxy (Iraq) was third, and S2G Esports from Turkey rounded out the top 4.

The PMGC 2021 Finals attracted 646.6K Peak Viewers, which is 83% fewer than the last world championship had (If we don't take into account the NimoTV's statistics for the previous year, the number of viewers decreased by 54%). The Average Viewers number of the Championship was 376.8K people, 29% fewer than last year's world championship result.

This time the organizers didn't partner up with NimoTV, so YouTube once again became the main broadcaster of the tournament: Peak Viewers number on the platform reached 632K spectators. All other services were significantly behind YT. Facebook Gaming was the closest pursuer, but still only attracted 30K Peak Viewers.

In addition to the less active promotion of the streams, the reason for the drop in viewership statistics was the absence of teams from Indonesia at the tournament. This country is one of the largest regions for PUBG Mobile, and at last year's tournament Indonesian spectators accounted for the majority of the viewers (2.1 million Peak Viewers with NimoTV and 1 million Peak Viewers without it), but this time there was not a single local team in the world championship finals, so the Peak Viewers number at Indonesian broadcasts was very modest — 35.6K PV.

The lack of viewers from Indonesia was compensated by the game's audience from India. PUBG Mobile is banned in the country, and the local teams didn't attend the last world championship. But this time GodLike Esports was among the participants. The team made it to the tournament via iQOO Battlegrounds Mobile India Series 2021, which was held in Battlegrounds Mobile India, the game that was developed specifically for the Indian market. As a result, PMGC 2021 drew more than 408K Peak Viewers from India, four times as many as the last world championship. 

Moreover, just like last year, the organizers actively attracted viewers to the broadcasts by in-game gifts. After surpassing the mark of one million viewers, players had a chance to win both in-game items and various bonuses in Google Play, Amazon Pay gift cards, and even OnePlus phones.

The PMGC 2021 showed several times lower viewership statistics than the PMGC 2020. However, it is worth mentioning that the statistics of the last year's tournament are more accurate, as they exclude the in-game promotional broadcasts that were conducted at PMGC 2020.

The only metric in which PMGC didn't lag so much behind last year's event series is the Average Viewers number. If PMGC 2021 had featured at least one team from Indonesia, the gap would have been less significant. We should remind you that the League East, held prior to finals, attracted more than 227K Indonesian spectators at its peak.

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The new PUBG Mobile esports season has already begun. Qualifiers for PMPL Season 5 in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam began on January 24 and PMGC MY/SG/PH Spring 2022 winners will be determined on January 26-30. At the end of the month, qualifications for the PMPL in the CIS, Turkey, Western Europe and North America will also begin, and the events for Latin America are scheduled for February.

Detailed statistics of the tournaments is available to our PRO subscribers. Even more data on teams, languages and broadcast platforms can be found in the dashboard: contact our sales department to discuss the terms.