PUBG Global Championship 2023 achieved highest peak viewership in Group Stage of any other event of the series
The final event of the PUBG 2023 Competitive Season is well underway. The PUBG Global Championship, or PGC for short, has started its 2023 iteration featuring a new revamped format to make spectating the event even more action-packed and exciting.
The PGC has been a yearly event in PUBG esports since 2019, and it has undergone yearly changes to its format ever since. PUBG Global Championship 2023 features a more compact Group Stage and a revamped Bracket Stage. Compared to 2022, the 2023 event hosted 3 fewer matches in both Groups A and B, but the stage spanned only 2 days per Group instead of 3.
The Bracket Stage of the event has been simplified, featuring a singular Losers Bracket rather than two separate ones as the 2022 PGC did, and the Grand Survival has been replaced with a Last Chance. The Grand Survival functioned as a final opportunity for teams to make the Grand Finals, but the new Last Chance format features a more comprehensive set of matches and brings the event more in line with the format of the PUBG Mobile Global Championship.
The new tighter Group Stage format of the event meant that the stage featured much less Airtime compared to 2022, but it made up for this in growth in concurrent viewers.
The PGC 2023 reached 143.6K Peak Viewers during Round 10 of the Group A matches. The tighter four-day schedule of the Group Stage secured the event a 12% growth in peak concurrent viewers and a 4.5% growth in average concurrent viewers.
The Hours Watched metric for the event is down by 17% compared to 2022 Groups, however, the new format of the event meant that Airtime fell by roughly 20%: accountable for the decrease in watch time.
Vietnamese, Thai, and English were the most popular languages of the Group Stage, fairly typical for the PUBG esports scene. However, the PGC 2023 event is being held in Bangkok, Thailand. Across previous PGC events, the host country has enjoyed a boost to the viewership of its local language on live-streaming platforms, for example: Korean with PGC 2021. Thai was unable to become the most popular language of the Group Stage, despite having a home-turf advantage.
Since 2019, the PUBG esports scene has hosted three Global Championship events, with the ongoing PGC 2023 being the fourth. Although the inaugural 2019 event enjoyed strong initial viewership, the following events failed to reach the same peak viewership that the 2019 event was able to garner.
However, the PUBG Global Championship 2023 may be the first year that the PGC records an increase in Peak Viewers compared to the previous year. During the Group Stage, the PGC 2023 was able to garner 143.6K Peak Viewers, roughly 15K concurrent viewers more than both the 2019 and 2022 PGC Group Stages.
Although the PGC 2023 event has started strong, it needs to continue to draw in strong viewership to usurp the 2019 event as the most popular Global Championship tournament. The 2022 PGC event was able to almost match the 2019 iteration during the Group Stage, recording less than 1K fewer Peak Viewers than the most popular event. The 2023 PGC event may follow the same path, showing strong Group Stage viewership but unable to reach the same height as the inaugural event.
The PUBG Global Championship 2023 is currently continuing with the Losers Bracket, and the Winners Bracket begins November 25. Keep a keen eye on the viewership statistics of the event using the tournament page, the event may just well become the most popular Global Championship in PUBG.
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