Thunderpick World Championship 2024: S1mple's presence attracts record viewers

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The Thunderpick World Championship 2024, which began on October 21, concluded at the LVL Dome Arena in Berlin. Its viewership stats saw massive jumps from the inaugural edition in 2023, led by the presence of star player s1mple, whose legendary status in the game ensures he pulls in a separate fanbase of his own whenever and wherever he plays.

  The MongolZ's win put them in the top five of Valve's rankings (Image via Thunderpick on X)   

The Thunderpick World Championship 2024 saw big names like HEROIC, Virtus.pro, Fnatic, and BIG duke it out. In the end, it was the fast-rising The MongolZ who emerged as the victor, taking home $500,000 and entering the top five of the Counter-Strike 2 teams according to Valve's rankings.

This competition reached 246.6K Peak Viewers during the Group Stage, Day 1 clash between Virtus.pro and Team Falcons. Interestingly, the Grand Final could not make the five most popular matches list, finishing in the seventh spot, although the eventual winner did have higher-placed entries from their games against other teams.

  Thunderpick World Championship 2024 – basic viewership stats and most popular matches   

Despite playing just two matches and getting knocked out early, the latter was able to attract large crowds, affecting the audience dynamics of the event. This was because of the presence of s1mple, on loan from NAVI, in the Team Falcons roster. Although he put in some impressive performances, this did not translate into success for his side, as it finished bottom of Group A with a 0:2 record.

The nearly 250K PV this tournament did was also 71% higher than the corresponding figure achieved at the Thunderpick World Championship 2023. As mentioned, this rise was fueled almost solely by Ukrainian megastar s1mple, with fans arriving in droves across platforms to catch him in action.

The Thunderpick World Championship 2024 also registered 3.7M Hours Watched and 41.8K Average Viewers over 88 hours of airtime. These numbers represented jumps from last year, also aided by the number of channels covering the matches almost doubling (from 59 to 100).

When looking at the most popular teams, Team Falcons was far ahead of any other side thanks to the presence of s1mple. In fact, it pulled in 72.2% more average online viewers than any other participant, while the difference to the top side by the same metric from last year was more than twice the number of spectators.

  Viewership stats of the two Thunderpick World Championships held so far   

Russian viewers were especially active this time as the language's share in the overall watch time rose by a little over 10%. More impressively, its peak concurrent viewership figures shot up by 200%, with fans and streamers highly interested in the match between Virtus.pro and Team Falcons.

The Thunderpick World Championship 2024 reinforced the fact that prominent teams and players can influence the audience dynamics of esports tournaments. One can only wonder what the final numbers would have looked like had s1mple made it to the latter stages, but it was still enough to take the event to new viewership heights.