Street Fighter 6 outperforms larger disciplines’ viewership for Gamers8 2023; struggles to match its record-breaking prize pool

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Street Fighter is going through a renaissance period with the release of Street Fighter 6 still generating hype and excitement for the fighting game. Viewership is on the rise as even smaller events like Red Bull Kumite in South Africa reach a new audience and set records for their series. On the heels of the hugely successful EVO 2023, Gamers8 hosted their own tournament for Street Fighter 6, and it was the first fighting game tournament in esports history to boast a $1M USD prize pool.

EVO 2023 was one of the biggest fighting game events in the long-running history of the esports genre. The event hosted the most-watched Street Fighter tournament of all time, with over 4M hours of watch time accumulated throughout the tournament. Not only was it a hugely successful event in terms of watch time, but it also set a new record for fighting game esports when 442K concurrent viewers tuned into the event. 

Even Capcom recognises this opportunity for the gold it is and plans to host the Capcom Cup X event for Street Fighter 6 in 2024. Having seen the community’s excitement for SF6, Capcom plans to host the biggest fighting game event in history, with $2M USD set aside for the professional season and $1M going to the winner of the ultimate cup. 

With all this in mind, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for Gamers8 to capitalise on the hype wave and host not only the largest fighting game event in terms of prize pool but also to try to become one of the most-watched events of the year. So, did the $1M investment pay off?

Gamers8 2023 Street Fighter 6 Viewership Statistics

All in all, the Gamers8 event for the discipline received 1.2M hours of watch time and averaged 41.1K concurrent viewers throughout the event. Undoubtedly a big amount of viewership for a fighting game, it still remains overshadowed by other Street Fighter events from this year. The Gamers8 Street Fighter 6 tournament only ranks fifth of the 2023 SF6 events per watch time and doesn’t even rank within the top ten overall. 

This means that the Gamers8 2023 SF6 event drew in less viewership than the Red Bull Kumite 2023 in South Africa, a relatively smaller event organiser who organised their largest prize pool ever for the South African event: $50K USD. Unable to truly tap into the Street Fighter 6 hype, the Gamers8 event received fewer average concurrent viewers than a Twitch Rivals event and the EVO Japan 2023 Street Fighter 5 tournament, which had only $15K up-for-grabs at the event.

In terms of peak concurrent viewers, Gamers8 2023 saw their viewership reach its climax during the Grand Finals match of AngryBird and Kakeru, with 105.8K fans tuning in concurrently. Once again, this figure isn’t low by any means, it ranks the event as the sixth-most popular event of 2023. However, proportionally to the prize pool it must be disappointing for the event organisers and the gameplay itself is at no fault. 

Gamers8 2023 held an extremely exciting Grand Finals match, as AngryBird defeated Kakeru in the Winners Finals before the two faced off again for the ultimate match. Kakeru managed to reverse sweep AngryBird after dropping into the Losers Bracket and it marks the first victory for Kakeru at an international event in SF6: something that surely would interest Japanese viewers, who make up a large portion of Street Fighters’ audience.

For our PRO subscribers, take note of the most popular streamers of the event. Community casters were present in the data for Gamers8 2023 and they brought significant viewership towards the event. Both major languages for the discipline were represented in these most popular streamers. 

However, Gamers8 2023 does not have the brand name in fighting game circles that an event like EVO does. Although community casters were covering the event, it is incomparable to the amount of community support that EVO receives. Gamers8 2023 received a decent amount of coverage from community casters, but EVO 2023 received almost ten times more community casters for their Street Fighter 6 event. 

Comparison of Street Fighter 6 to other Gamers8 2023 events

In our recap article for the Gamers8 2023 CS:GO event, we looked at how the event compared to other tournaments that Gamers8 have hosted this year: including Street Fighter 6. CS:GO was arguably the most popular event that Gamers8 hosted this year, with their third-party event rivalling the Riyadh Masters Dota 2 event, which boasted a monstrous $15M USD for its prize pool.

  Gamers8 2023 events comparison, taken from our Gamers8 CS:GO recap  

However, following behind CS:GO in the Peak Viewers rankings was the Street Fighter 6 event. The SF6 tournament received more than double the peak concurrent viewers of the Tekken 7 event, and it received just slightly more than the Gamers8 2023 Fortnite event, which had $2M USD available in prize money. Street Fighter 6 is a popular game and did manage to outrank games like Rainbow Six: Siege and Fortnite, despite only having half of the prize pool that these tournaments boasted.

Although it's hard to say what went wrong for Gamers8, it might have something to do with brand awareness. Gamers8 is a new name to the esports industry and it is likely that some Street Fighters fans were not even aware of this event, compared to how ubiquitous the EVO name is. Despite the low viewership for Gamers8 compared to EVO, Street Fighter 6 did perform its magic and continue the trend of Street Fighter 6 events outperforming other games and disciplines that draw in sizeable viewership.  

Maybe Gamers8 will host another Street Fighter event in the near future and it will perform better in terms of viewership, but the only way to know is to stay up-to-date. Keep on track of all things esports and viewership with Esports Charts.