Landscape of Esports Shooters in Asia — is the timing right for a Chinese Counter-Strike 2 Major?

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On the final day of the CS Asia Championships, Perfect World announced that the second CS2 Major of 2024 will occur in Shanghai, China. Rumours have circulated in the Counter-Strike community that PGL, who will organise the first Major of 2024 in Copenhagen, will work alongside Perfect World to hold the event in Shanghai, but this is yet to be confirmed.

Perfect World is the exclusive distributor of Dota 2 and Counter-Strike in China, launching a CS:GO beta build for the Chinese market in 2017. Although there is no released version of CS2 under Perfect World yet, the announcement of a Major is a sure sign that one is in the works. 

Chinese viewership in live streaming is enigmatic. Calculating exact viewership for certain streams with the publicly available data is impossible, due to the unreliability of the data reported by the platforms. Perfect World has the statistics for the player base of their CS:GO release, and they must have some promising metrics for Valve to approve their first-ever Major event in China. 

While we cannot directly analyse the viewership of streams hosted on Chinese live streaming platforms, we can examine the landscape of esports in Asia, analysing the viewership of esports shooters, which esports disciplines are most popular in Asia, and which regions generate the most viewership are key areas to explore to determine the viability of a Chinese CS2 Major. 

At a glance, shooters in esports are struggling to continue to expand on the massive viewership they generated in 2022. This is true for both the global stage of esports as well as the Asian front. Although when many Western esports fans think of the word “esports”, they might think of Counter-Strike, Valorant, or a different shooter, this branch of esports is dwindling in viewership slightly.

Overall, esports viewership as a whole has actually grown by roughly 1% compared to 2022, based on current data as of now, this figure may rise by end-of-year. As of December 7, the industry as a whole has generated 2.86B Hours Watched in 2023. Shooters make up roughly a third of this figure, and Asian viewership is only 15.8% of the global shooters viewership.

Figures in the billions and hundreds of millions are hard to grasp and these metrics are only a superficial glance at the overview of the shooters scene in esports. With this in mind, let’s dive deeper into the statistics and see what exactly makes Asian esports tick.

Immediately striking is that Valorant is by far the most-watched esports discipline in Asia. Riot Games is already entrenched in Asia with their League of Legends esports events, and they have converted this foothold into a strong basis for Valorant to build off of. Valorant generated 65.8% of the total esports PC shooters watch time in 2023 for Asia.

PUBG: Battlegrounds generated 20.33M Hours Watched from Asian audiences in 2022, coming out just slightly ahead of Apex Legends. PUBG is hugely popular in Thailand and Vietnam as well as the PUBG Mobile release across Asia, and both Battle Royales PUBG and Apex Legends generated far more watch time than Counter-Strike.

Counter-Strike, including both CS:GO and CS2, was accountable for only 2.5% of the total watch time generated from Asia in 2023. The esports discipline generated only 3.82M HW, following a 79.2% drop in watch time compared to 2022. This decline was largely caused by one singular broadcaster, rather than a disappearance of interest for the esports discipline.

500BROS is a Vietnamese broadcaster for Counter-Strike events. In 2022, they hosted their coverage on NimoTV, the global operation of the Chinese platform Huya Live. NimoTV is extremely popular with Vietnamese audiences, but they sometimes utilise auto-playing broadcasts on their splash page. 500BROS benefited from having their stream embedded on NimoTV’s homepage, so when they moved to YouTube Live in 2023 their viewership statistics dropped to a more representative figure of the audience for Counter-Strike. Comparing 500BROS’ viewership for their coverage of the BLAST Premier Spring 2022 Finals to the BLAST Premier Fall Final 2023, their Average Viewers metric fell by 90%. 

In 2022, with the help of 500BROS, CS:GO was the most-watched esports discipline by Vietnamese audiences. However, looking at the data for 2023 the most-watched discipline for this region has become PUBG, which generates 37.6% of the total Hours Watched from Vietnamese audiences.

Critical to note here is the dominance of Japanese viewership in the region, as well as the overwhelming popularity of Valorant. Japanese-language broadcasts generated 87.6M Hours Watched in 2023, largely thanks to Valorant and Apex Legends. These two disciplines were accountable for over 92.4% of total Japanese watch time, with Counter-Strike generating less than 5K Hours Watched by Japanese broadcasts. 

Valorant is the fastest-growing esports discipline in Asia, generating 6.8M more Hours Watched in 2023 than in the previous year. Overwatch did manage to increase its watch time by 14.9% in 2023, but it only generated a total of 3.14M HW in the region for this year. 

Despite the loss of viewership experienced by 500BROS when transitioning to YouTube Live, Vietnamese-language broadcasts remain the largest source of viewership for Counter-Strike. Japanese, Thai, Korean, and Chinese broadcasts barely contributed to Counter-Strike’s viewership at all; these four languages generated only 101K HW for the discipline in 2023.

Whether the Counter-Strike 2024 Shanghai Major will be beneficial for the discipline is yet to be seen, but the viewership statistics outside of China for esports shooters show that Valorant is by far the more popular esports discipline in Asia. Battle Royales, such as Apex Legends and PUBG, are generally the more popular genre of shooter, but Valorant stands at the top as an exception to this rule.

The release of CS2 by Perfect World in China may just be the revitalisation Counter-Strike is looking for in the region. 2024 brings the first full year of CS2 esports, and Valve has a critical opportunity to restructure the esports scene of the discipline to compete with other shooters in the upcoming years. With Esports Charts, users can track the viewership of esports tournaments to gauge popularity objectively. 2024 will be an important year for Counter-Strike, don’t miss anything with the help of the Esports Charts database.