Splitgate Pro Series Fall Season 2022 results — abnormal viewership growth raises many questions

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Splitgate Pro Series is a professional esports tactical shooter Splitgate league by 1047 Games. The Launch Season ended in December 2021, and in 2022, the organizers announced a series of three new seasons (Winter, Summer and Fall), now in partnership with Prime Gaming and Amazon. The total prize pool of all events, including the qualifying stages, amounted to more than $500K. 

The first two seasons of Splitgate Pro Series featured regular mixes of US players. Before the start of the summer season, the league had partner clubs, including prominent esports organizations Luminosity, eUnited, T1, XSET, MoistE, Spacestation Gaming, Pioneers and Elevate.

Splitgate Pro Series Summer Season featured partner clubs competing mostly against each other, but Splitgate Pro Series Fall Season 2022 had a slightly different format — the organizers decided to hold a Major where partner clubs would play against teams from qualifiers instead of the standard Grand Final. The regular season is necessary to determine seeding for Majors. Splitgate Pro Series 2022 Fall Major takes place on October 1-2 in online format, with 12 teams competing for a $100K prize pool.

Viewership Statistics 

Splitgate Pro Series Fall Season 2022 matches accumulated 36.5K Hours Watched. The Average Viewers number reached 1.5K people, and the Peak Viewers number was 12.4K spectators. The most popular teams of the tournament are Luminosity Gaming and eUnited. All Fall Season broadcasts were in English only and available exclusively on Twitch.

Interestingly, the most popular game of the regular season is the match between T1 and eUnited, played on Day 1. Day 2 had a similar audience reach, but then the viewership dropped tenfold and remained at that level until the end of the regular season. 

On August 20 and 21, the official Splitgate channel on Twitch showed almost identical metrics during the broadcast: 12.9K and 12.1K HW, 3.5K and 3.6K AV, 12.6K and 13.3K PV. The final day of the season had 652 AV and 977 PV. Thus, the numbers on the first two days were abnormally increased.

Splitgate Pro Series Fall Season 2022 streams. The first two days of the tournament are highlighted in green.

After the first two days, all official broadcast metrics collapsed. The PV number dropped tenfold, The HW and AV numbers decreased by four to five times, although the Airtime remained almost unchanged.

It is interesting that on September 20, the AV number on the official broadcast ranged from 550-750 people for more than half of the broadcasts, with most viewers authorized on Twitch. The chart went up sharply at a certain point and literally went from 600 to 6.7K AV in just five minutes, and an hour later got to the 12.6K mark. Despite this leap, the number of Authorized Viewers, even at the moment of Peak online, grew to only 700-740 people. This is an anomalous disproportion. There was a similar situation during the August 21 stream, when in just one hour the number of viewers jumped tenfold. There were no objective reasons for this increase — it happened during random team matches.

We should note that this is not the first abnormal jump in viewership on the official Splitgate channel. Similar statistics were also observed during the Winter and Summer seasons, usually on the first game days. After that, the numbers would drop several times over. 

Many of such leaps in viewership on a channel can be seen after raids by top streamers, but this case has two subtleties:

1. the number of Authorized Viewers grows during raids;
2. there were no raids during the tournament broadcasts on the Splitgate channel.

The only possible explanation is the promotion of broadcasts on third-party resources. However, it did not have any long-term effect on the popularity of the league. Almost none of the new viewers were logged on Twitch, and in the days following the promotion, the viewership dwindled and returned to its previous levels. So far, the league has not been able to establish a positive growth rate, and one-time promotions alone are not enough to change that.