BLAST’s inaugural Open Spring 2025 breaks half-a-million viewers for its Group Stage matches

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The inaugural BLAST Open Spring 2025 kicked off to promising viewership results of the first round of Group Stage matches. Later in this stage, the BLAST Premier tournament was able to reach a new peak viewership, and outperform many of Counter-Strike’s events of 2025 so far. With BLAST’s new event going strong through groups, the playoffs stage of the tournament could reach exciting heights.

The most popular game of the BLAST Open Spring 2025 from March 19 to 23 was MOUZ’s game against Team Spirit. Spirit are always followed by a sizable Russian-speaking fanbase, but a wider, international English-speaking audience is what drove MOUZ’s match against Team Spirit above 500,000 Peak Viewers (PV).

Since coming in the top four at last year’s Shanghai Major, MOUZ had a slow start to 2025 until PGL Cluj-Napoca 2025 – speaking of which, the BLAST Open Spring 2025 is already almost more popular than the grand final of Cluj Napoca. At the event, MOUZ were able to claim the trophy after defeating Team Falcons 3:1, and then claimed a second-place at the recent ESL Pro League. Following on from these successes, MOUZ lined up to face the dominant Team Spirit in the Upper Bracket Semifinals of Group A.

In a nutshell, MOUZ were on a hotstreak, and Team Spirit were a perfect test for the European organization to measure themselves against. The game quickly became one of the tournament’s most popular matches, but as it unfolded entirely, viewership quickly rose to match the electrifying match. 

After an inexorable map one victory from Team Spirit, MOUZ were able to equalize the score with an overtime win on map two, before claiming the victory with a 25-22 win on the final map, Ancient. Overtime games are always uniquely popular, and the wave of excitement for this nail-biter match helped it to reach almost 530,000 viewers for this Group Stage match.

Apart from this game, Team Spirit’s elimination match against FaZe Clan and Virtus.pro’s game against Team Falcons both ranked highly with over 490,000 PV. The Russian teams and popular international squads appealed to Counter-Strike's two largest demographics: Russian-language viewers and English-speaking ones. 

While Alexandre “Gaules” Borba was indeed one of the most popular co-streamers of the event, he did not contribute much to the top matches we have already mentioned. Gaules received his Peak Viewership during FURIA’s elimination game against M80. The Brazilian squad was unfortunately knocked out of the tournament by a 17-19 overtime loss, meaning the Brazilian PV of the group stage will unlikely be met in the playoffs.

Other popular co-streamers included Roman “mokrivskyi” Mokrivsky, a popular Ukrainian Counter-Strike co-streamer, and Mark “ohnePixel” Zimmermann, a German creator who broadcasts in English. Both of these co-streamers were able to reach well over 50,000 concurrent viewers for their personal broadcasts, but both fell significantly behind Gaules, who attracted significant viewership from his YouTube and Twitch multi-streams.

All in all, the ongoing BLAST Open Spring 2025 is a hot event. The top teams in the world are in attendance, viewership is quickly surpassing the likes of other third-party events like PGL’s Cluj-Napoca, and it will hopefully skyrocket even higher for playoffs. Depending on who qualifies for playoffs, the new Open tournament could soon become one of BLAST’s most popular formats.