Grandmasters 2022 Season 1 — how has the final year of the series started?

Loading

There’s a big question mark over the esports future of Hearthstone. At the end of last year, Blizzard announced expansive plans for the discipline in 2022, including more events in the Masters series, the long-awaited Battlegrounds event, more spots at the World Championship, as well as… the final season of the Grandmasters series.

It is not yet clear how the Hearthstone esports ecosystem will change for the “Standard” mode, but the change is definitely on time – not in the least because the tournaments dedicated to this mode have been attracting fewer and fewer viewers in recent years. Esports Charts tells how many viewers followed Grandmasters 2022 Season 1.

Season results 

The structure of Grandmasters tournaments has not changed compared to previous years. The event is still divided into three divisions: EMEA, America, and Asia-Pacific, with 16 participants in each. The playoff participants are determined in the course of two weeks, and the decisive battles take place in the third.

Traditionally, Grandmasters is full of surprises – which was true for this time as well. For example, a player under the nickname Mighty became the champion in Asia: the only representative of India beat the eminent Japanese Alutemu in the final and not only won more than $2.6K but also earned a spot in the World Championship 2022.

The results of the American region were similarly unusual, where only one representative from North America reached the top 4. The Brazilian player Pascoa became the champion, defeating the American e-athlete GamerRvg in the final with a score of 3:0.

Perhaps Europe was home to the most predictable results of the tournament: the legendary Jarla became the champion here. The Czech e-athlete has again qualified for the World Championship and will now try to take revenge for the defeat in the 2020 final when he lost to glory from Japan.

Season statistics

The finished tournaments in the three regions turned generated the least popularity among the viewers of the series of all time. None of the competitions managed to attract even 10K Peak Viewers, and their Average Viewers indicators did not even exceed 6K.

Grandmasters 2022 Season 1 Statistics

The tournament for participants from Asia was the most successful of the three divisions in terms of Peak Viewers, attracting 9.5K of these during the group stage match between Posesi and che0nsu. This was achieved because this match was actively followed by viewers not only of the main English broadcast but also by the audience of the official Korean and Japanese streams.

America became the leader in terms of Average Viewers, with 5.8K of these following the matches. However, the difference with the rest of the divisions turned out to be extremely insignificant, being worth only 100-200 people.

It is noteworthy that Europe surpassed everyone in terms of total Hours Watched, although this event was covered exclusively in English (for example, the American event was also broadcast in Spanish and Portuguese). The regional tournament generated 323.6K Hours Watched in 56 hours of airtime.

Compared to the last season of last year, almost all divisions turned out to gather less audience interest. Tournaments suffered a drop in all major metrics (note that the total Hours Watched was also affected by the decreased airtime of the tournaments). Average Viewers gain (albeit extremely insignificant) is observed only in America.

***

The second (and last in the series) season of Grandmasters 2022 will start only at the end of September, but we can hardly expect big numbers of viewership statistics from it. Much more interesting is how large of an audience will be gathered by Battlegrounds Lobby Legends, scheduled for April 2-3. This championship will be broadcast not only on YouTube, but also on Twitch, and, most likely, its participants will be allowed to conduct their own broadcasts.