EVO 2022 - Tournaments Overview and Viewership Results

The Evolution Championship Series 2022 event took place in the USA on August 5-7. It featured tournaments in more than a dozen fighting games, from Tekken to the recently released MultiVersus. After a forced break due to the coronavirus, the event has finally returned to the traditional LAN format. The Michelob ULTRA Arena, located at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, has become the main venue.

If you are not familiar with EVO, this is not just a mere series of tournaments, but a big gaming festival, which is attended by fighting game fans from all over the world. In addition to the competition itself, the event also hosts fan meetings with developers, while game studios often choose EVO to announce their upcoming titles. For each festival, the organizers bring a lot of game stands and arcade machines available for everyone to play. Various contests are also held there, with photo zones with cosplayers, shops with merchandise, and many other points of interest being set up.

It should be reminded that in March 2021, Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC acquired the rights to the Evolution Championship Series and essentially took the festival under its wing after the difficult pandemic-related period.

The most popular tournaments at EVO 2022 were those dedicated to Street Fighter V, Guilty Gear, and Tekken. They scored about a million Hours Watched each, as well as reached the mark of 250K Peak Viewers. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R EVO Exhibition Tournament attracted the fewest viewers as the tournament scored only 9.7K Hours Watched and attracted 1.6K Peak Viewers.

Main tournament results and audience coverage

EVO 2022 Tekken has become the most watched EVO tournament. Its matches generated 1.2M Hours Watched and attracted 54.5K Average Viewers along with 250.5K Peak Viewers. The most popular match was the final fight between Pakistani e-athlete KHAN and Korean plater Knee. The latter won and was awarded $7.2K.

The vast majority of viewers watched the English-language streams from the tournament (216K Peak Viewers). The second spot went to the streams in Korean (14.7K), and the third spot went to the French-language ones (12.5K). As usual, Twitch has become the leading platform in terms of audience reach: 240K Peak Viewers against 10.9K on YouTube.

EVO 2022 SFV matches generated over 1.1M Hours Watched, as well as gathered 38.3K Average Viewers and 250.7K Peak Viewers. The audience was most attracted by the matches of the American player iDom (298K Hours Watched) and the Japanese player Kawano (208K Hours Watched). The battle of these two players in the grand final became the most popular match of the tournament. The victory went to the Japanese, who, in addition to the title, received a quota for Capcom Cup IX and $5.5K.

The leading broadcast languages were English (189.9K Peak Viewers) and Japanese (37.3K Peak Viewers). Broadcasts in French, Portuguese and Korean also gathered 7-8K Peak Viewers each. The majority of viewers followed the matches on Twitch streams: 209K Peak Viewers against 40.2K Peak Viewers on YouTube channels.

The third most popular tournament of the event was EVO 2022 Guilty Gear -STRIVE-, which generated 891K Hours Watched and gathered 30.7K Average Viewers and 201.8K Peak Viewers. In the grand final, the American pro UMISHO defeated Slash from Saudi Arabia, for which he received a quota for the ARC World Tour 2022 Final and $9K in prize money.

Interestingly enough, the mark of 201.8K Peak Viewers was recorded during the first matches of the final game day, when two games were played simultaneously. The most popular match was the fight between the American Hotashi and the Korean Daru, in which the US representative unexpectedly defeated the opponent with a score of 3:2.

English became the main language of the broadcasts, attracting 185.5K Peak Viewers. The top 3 languages also included Korean (7.2K) and French (3.7K). Nearly all viewers followed the fights via Twitch (200.8K Peak Viewers).

EVO 2022 tournaments viewership comparison

While the three top tournaments scored about a million Hours Watched, several events at once showed results in the range of 400-600K Hours Watched.

The matches of EVO 2022 The King of Fighters XV generated 549K Hours Watched and gathered 146.3K Peak Viewers. The matches of EVO 2022 Dragon Ball FighterZ generated 438K Hours Watched and gathered 84K Peak Viewers. The audience coverage of EVO 2022 Mortal Kombat 11 amounted to 405.6K Hours Watched and 95.6K Peak Viewers.

The EVO 2022 MultiVersus tournament generated almost 600K Hours Watched, and gathered 62.3K Peak Viewers. Interestingly, the MultiVersus event had the largest prize fund among all the championships of the festival: a total of $100K was up for grabs.

Audience reach dynamics

Most popular Street Fighter, Tekken & Guilty Gear tournaments by PV

As mentioned above, the EVO fighting festival returned to a full-fledged LAN format in 2022, featuring a large number of disciplines, participants, and viewers. It was obvious that fans and regulars of EVO have been missing the event, so this year the audience reach has experienced significant growth.

In 2021, the number of views for EVO disciplines was incredibly low. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the organizers did not hold a single big international tournament but arranged a series of regional online competitions, which did not resonate with the audience that much. Last year, top disciplines generated only a few tens of thousands of Hours Watched, while this year these figures have exceeded one million.

To provide more understanding of the overall dynamics, we compared the performance of 2022 with the performance of the last full-fledged EVO tournaments that took place in LAN format.

As mentioned above, EVO 2022 for Street Fighter V reached the mark of 250.7K Peak Viewers, but it is also worth mentioning that this became a new record for the discipline. Before this, the highest mark for this fighting game was that of 238K Peak Viewers, reached during EVO 2018. A new record was also set for the Tekken discipline: at EVO 2019, the fighting game attracted 227K Peak Viewers, and at EVO 2022 this figure already grew to 250.5K.

The Guilty Gear Tournament has doubled this figure since its last best result. If at EVO 2018 it managed to gather 109K Peak Viewers, then in 2022 this number grew to 201K.

It was the Mortal Kombat 11 tournament that was the farthest from setting a new record. In January 2019, the Mortal Kombat 11: The Reveal show tournament gathered 314K Peak Viewers. In 2021, during the AT&T Annihilator Cup, there were 126.1K Peak Viewers. As for the past EVO 2022, the title gathered only 95.6K Peak Viewers, which is the third best result in the history of the discipline.