PUBG Global Championship 2021 Results — Viewers are Still into the Game, but how to Get New Audience?

Loading

The last tournament in PUBG esports season ended — Global Championship 2021, which was held in the Korean city of Incheon. The competition lasted a whole month, and the intrigue of who would take the first place remained until the last map. In terms of viewership statistics, PGC 2021 has confirmed a long-standing thesis: the esports scene of the game has a stable audience, but it is not growing. Esports Charts summarizes the results of the tournament.

PGC 2021 Statistical Overview

Traditionally, the international PUBG event brought together 32 teams that represented Europe, Asia, Asia-Pacific, as well as North and South America. The competition was held in a hybrid format. Most of the participants played from Studio Paradise (one of the largest content production sites in Korea) and the Chinese teams played remotely.

PGC was divided into several stages with participants being gradually eliminated. As a result, only 16 teams reached the final stage, and a really fierce struggle unfolded between the NewHappy team from China and the European team Heroic. Everything was resolved on the very last map, where NH finished 13th, and Heroic could not take advantage of the opponent's failure as they only took 7th place, which wasn’t enough. The trophy and $1.3 million are coming to China.

PGC 2021 games were on air for 133 hours, and the matches gained 13.9M Hours Watched. This is the second result in the history of the discipline; only PUBG Global Invitational S 2021 held in early Spring collected more.

The peak audience of the event was 189.2K people. At the same time, the maximum audience of PGC was reached at the very beginning of the event on November 25, when the third day of the first week of Weekly Survival was played.

It is noteworthy that several channels in different languages at once made a comparable contribution to the final figures of viewership activity. For example, Twitch broadcasts in English and Korean showed almost identical numbers by Peak Viewers and total Hours Watched. Note that Korean, English, Thai and Vietnamese streams accounted for more than 80% of the total time viewers spent watching games.

PUBG esports audience is not growing

The peak interest in PUBG was in 2018 during the PUBG Global Invitational: this tournament set the record for the maximum concurrent audience in the history of the discipline (759.5K people), as well as for the average audience, which was almost 400K viewers. Now international PUBG events gather four times less spectators.

However, one should remember that next year PUBG will celebrate its 5th anniversary, and the game still has a fairly large core audience, mainly in Asian countries. In addition, 2021 was the year of the game's new records on Korean and Thai broadcasts by Peak Viewers (even though they were not reached at PGC).

PGC lost in all key metrics to another international tournament of the discipline, which took place in March — PUBG Global Invitational S 2021. However, the decline was not that catastrophic (the peak fell by 15%, and the average audience fell by 12%). Yet, to prevent it going further the developers obviously have some work to do. Perhaps the situation will change after the transition to the F2P distribution model, which will be implemented at the beginning of 2022.

One should also note that the mobile version of PUBG is way more popular among Asian audience than its desktop counterpart. The ongoing PUBG Mobile Global Championship 2021 League East is ahead of PGC by 60% in Average Viewers, and its current Peak Viewers number is 142% bigger!

Remember that detailed data on the languages and broadcast platforms of the tournament is available to our PRO subscribers. Also follow us on social media to stay up to date with the most relevant viewership stats of esports!