The Most Popular Esports Tournaments, January 2022

The new esports season has begun. The regional tournaments in League of Legends have already started, and the first matches of BLAST Premier 2022 have taken place in CS:GO. Esports Charts provides an overview of the January results and talks about the most popular tournaments at the beginning of 2022.

Unlike last year, this time January did not feature the ML:BB World Championship, causing League of Legends to take the lead instead. The largest audience in January was gathered by LCK Spring 2022, one of the most popular esports leagues in the world. The match between the two most popular teams of the tournament — DWG KIA vs. T1 — gathered over 759K viewers.

The fourth spot also went to LoL league — LEC Spring 2022. Over 527K Peak Viewers watched the debut match of the renewed G2 Esports roster against Excel Esports.

The PUBG Mobile World Championship aroused great interest among viewers, with PMGC 2021 Finals attracting over 646K concurrent spectators, which is way fewer than last year (you can read about the reasons in a separate article). In addition, the iQOO Battlegrounds Mobile India Series 2021 competition (which was a world championship qualifier held in a separate game) attracted 460K viewers. Mobile gaming tournaments were ranked second and fifth, respectively.

The first tournament of the BLAST Premier 2022 season entered the top 3 based on the Peak Viewers indicator. The match between MIBR and NAVI attracted two extremely active fan bases (Russian- and Portuguese-speaking viewers), with up to 542K Peak Viewers watching the game.

In January, the English-speaking audience mainly followed not only League of Legends, but also Apex Legends. More than 300K viewers followed the aforementioned match between G2 Esports and Excel Esports, while at the LCS 2022 pre-season tournament it was the game between Team Liquid and Evil Geniuses that caused a stir and attracted 223K viewers.

In Apex Legends, the finals of ALGS 2022 Split 1 were a huge success, attracting more than 245K viewers thanks to a large number of broadcasts, including those from the participants of the event themselves. The top 5 also included the OTK Apex Invitational streamer tournament with 182K viewers.

It is noteworthy that BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2022 was also in the top 5, however, the English-speaking audience did not follow NAVI and MIBR. Rather, the #1 match was the meeting between FaZe and Vitality with 217K Peak Viewers.

Aside from BLAST Premier, the Russian-speaking audience mainly followed Dota 2 in January. The top 5 ended up featuring four tournaments held in Valve’s MOBA.

The most popular Dota 2 match among the Russian-speaking viewers was the one between the reigning TI champions Team Spirit and the region’s most popular team NAVI that was played in the upper division of the DPC EEU, gathering more than 160K Peak Viewers. In the second division, the audience showed the greatest interest in the match between Gambit and CIS Rejects, which consists of former NAVI and Virtus.pro stars.

The Twitch audience mostly followed League of Legends in January. Three regional leagues (LCK, LEC, and LCS) got into the top 5, while two broadcasts of the Korean tournament attracted over 140K Peak Viewers each.