The Six Invitational 2024 opens to lower viewership compared to the previous edition
The largest Rainbow Six: Siege tournament of the year kicked off on February 13, featuring 20 of the best teams from around the globe. However, the Six Invitational 2024 was not able to increase its viewership compared to the previous year, something the event has struggled with for years.
2024 marks the fourth year running the annual invitational tournament features a $3,000,000 prize pool, and the event kicks off with the 20 teams divided into 4 groups of 5. Following the conclusion of this stage on February 17, the bottom team of each group will be eliminated, allowing the remaining 16 teams to proceed to the double-elimination Playoffs.
Six Invitational 2024 Day 1 Viewership Statistics
On the first day of the Group Stage, 8 matches were played, equally divided between all four groups. Although the day featured top teams from popular regions like Europe, North America, and Brazil, viewership was low and the day barely broke 1M hours of watch time. In total, almost 13 hours of broadcasting generated 1.01M Hours Watched, marking a 23.2% drop in watch time compared to the first day of the Six Invitational 2023.
Viewership was down across the board for the 2024 iteration of the yearly event, and Peak Viewers and Average Viewers dropped by 17.4% and 19.2%, respectively. The match between the Brazilian Team Liquid roster and Virtus.pro was the most popular game of the day, contributing heavily to the 102.3K Peak Viewers. Although the match received significantly higher viewership than any other match throughout the day, it still represented a drop in viewership compared to the previous year.
The Six Invitational 2024 was Rainbow Six Siege’s first return to Brazil in a long time. The event is taking place at the Ginásio do Ibirapuera in São Paulo, and many of the teams at the event are entirely made up of Brazilians or include a Brazilian in their roster. Of the top 3 most popular matches on the first day of the tournament, 2 of these featured Brazilian teams: Team Liquid and Ninjas in Pyjamas.
Although one might expect Brazilian teams to entirely dominate these rankings, this is not what happened. The number one and number two ranked teams attending the event, w7m esports and FaZe Clan, are both entirely Brazilian, but their matches did not rank within the top 3 most popular of the day. Generally, the highest viewership was recorded by matches that went to the third map of the Bo3.
Both Team Liquid’s game against Virtus.pro and DarkZero Esports’ match against Geekay Esports went to the third map, garnering high viewership. W7m esports and FaZe Clan, arguably the more popular Brazilian teams, received lower viewership for their 2-0 matches. The match between G2 Esports and Ninjas in Pyjamas was the only match of our top 3 to not go to the third map; G2 Esports are the reigning champions and the top team from Europe, fans from around the world were excited to see them play again.
The Six Invitational event was established in 2017 with a small 6-team trial tournament. The following year, things began to take off as the event upped its prize pool to $500K and began inviting more of the best teams from around the globe.
Nearly every single year since 2018, the Six Invitational has found less interest and viewership for itself. The events have generally gotten longer and been broadcast for much longer, which has helped the watch time of the events continue to grow. The Six Invitational 2021 was the most-watched iteration of the event ever, garnering 18.5M Hours Watched thanks to a lengthy 100+ hour tournament.
However, the peak viewership of the event shows that the audience for these esports events is not growing. 2022 was the first time since 2017 that the event failed to reach more than 300K concurrent viewers at peak, and the 2023 iteration experienced a drop to 232.3K PV.
So far the viewership is down, but the event will continue for another 10 days and has plenty of opportunities to grow its audience as the tournament progresses. Those interested can visit the Six Invitational 2024 tournament page to keep track of the event’s viewership as it proceeds, and even use the Schedule tab to keep on top of who is playing when.
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