PUBG Global Championship 2022 lost to the last World Championship by Peak Viewers

PUBG Global Championship 2022, organized by the game developer PUBG Corporation, ended on November 20 in Dubai. Esports Charts summarizes the results of the final event of the season, which attracted fewer viewers than in 2021.

Tournament results

PUBG Global Championship 2022 was attended by 32 teams that competed at the Dubai Exhibition Centre. The initial prize pool for the tournament was $2M, but the sales of in-game cosmetic items throughout the tournament increased it to $3.3M. The organizers will announce the final amount later.

The winner of the PUBG Global Championship 2022 was Natus Vincere, which scored the most points in the final stage. Interestingly, the fate of the championship was decided in the very last round: as a result, Natus Vincere overtook the closest rivals from 17 Gaming and Twisted Minds and earned more than $1M. Note that the champions of past tournaments of the PGC series (Korean Gen.G and Chinese NewHappy) can hardly be satisfied with the results since they did not even reach the final stage.

Viewership statistics

PUBG Global Championship 2022 matches generated over 7.3M Hours Watched and attracted 104.1K Average Viewers. The peak viewership mark was reached during the final round of the tournament and amounted to 184.5K Peak Viewers.

The most popular broadcast languages for PUBG Global Championship 2022 were Vietnamese (25.3% of total Hours Watched) and Thai (24.8%). English ranks third, far behind the previous two (18.2%). As shown by the statistics, PUBG and this tournament in particular are more interesting to viewers from Asia: Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and China. The Western audience accounted for about 30% of the event's Hours Watched.

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In terms of platforms, about 53.3% of viewers watched matches on YouTube, while 40.7% used Twitch. The YouTube channels PUBG SEA and PUBG TH had the largest audience, each generating 1.25-1.3M Hours Watched from the total. Community casting played a big role in the coverage of PUBG Global Championship 2022 matches. In total, the tournament was streamed on over 170 channels. For comparison, at the World Cup in 2021, there were only 69 such channels.

Comparison with past tournaments

PUBG Global Championship 2022 became the fourth tournament in the history of the discipline by total Hours Watched, and tenth by Peak Viewers. The ranking of events by this latter metric is topped by PUBG Global Invitational 2018 with its 759.5K Peak Viewers.

PGC tournament statistics (2019-2022)

Compared to previous World Cups (remember that the event was canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic) PGC 2019 continued to lead by Peak Viewers, gathering 197K of them, and PGC 2021 — by Average Viewers, the number of which amounted to 104.6K.

PUBG Global Championship 2022 fell slightly short of World Cup 2021 by audience coverage, although more channels were covering the last World Championship. The event’s viewership is gradually decreasing: the core audience continues to follow the discipline, but no new viewers appear. It is likely that in 2023 this decline will become even more pronounced.

Interestingly, in parallel with the PUBG Global Championship 2022, Malaysia is hosting the PUBG Mobile Global Championship 2022. The World Cup for the mobile version of the title is still far from over, but already now it shows much better results by all metrics — having attracted 505K Peak Viewers and 250K Average Viewers so far.