PUBG Mobile Global Championship 2023 is on track to become one of the most-watched events in the game

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The PUBG Mobile Global Championship 2023 is underway. The tournament is the ultimate winner-takes-all event for the discipline’s competitive season and sees the best squads from around the world assemble for a chance at a world championship title. 

The League stage of the event is being held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It is the first section of the event, which consists of three separate stages: Group Stage, Survival Stage, and Last Chance. Currently, the Group Stage and Survival Stage have been completed, with the Last Chance being held throughout this weekend, November 25 and 26.

Although the event still has the high-stakes Finals stage to go, the current viewership statistics for the event show that more fans are watching than in the past couple of years. If the 2023 Global Championship can stay on track with its current viewership, it will likely become the most popular event since the inaugural PUBG Mobile Global Championship.

Throughout the first two stages of the event, the Global Championship 2023 event has drawn in 19.14M Hours Watched. In terms of both Average Viewers and Hours Watched, the event has shown a slight increase of 5% compared to the previous year. 

Looking towards Peak Viewers, the event’s true growth in popularity is more clear to see. The event drew in 652K Peak Viewers for Round 23 of the Group Stage, marking a 29% increase in concurrent viewers compared to 2022’s Groups. 

Of these 652K concurrent viewers, the majority of them came from YouTube Live. YouTube Live is the often preferred live-streaming platform for many esports fans in Asia, and this tournament was no different. TikTok is also very popular in the region, and over 110K of the total Peak Viewers figure came from the mobile platform.

Of the hundreds of channels covering the event, both official and community casters, less than 10 of these broadcasts were hosted on Twitch. The purple live-streaming platform seems to not be a popular option for coverage of this event, but the Global Championship event has been able to draw in hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers regardless.

  Comparison of viewership for the PUBG Mobile Global Championships  

Although the 2023 Championship is currently on track to outperform the 2022 iteration, it will be unlikely to outperform the first-ever Global Championship event held in late 2020. The PUBG Mobile Global Championship Season 0 was the first major world championship held for the discipline, and the hype for the event was unparalleled. 

The first Global Championship reached 3.8M Peak Viewers, partially thanks to the hype for the first championship but it also received a large portion of viewers thanks to in-game broadcasts and drawing viewers in with in-game items: similar to the Twitch Drops system. 

The recent Global Championship events for PUBG have replaced NimoTV with TikTok, potentially a better option for mobile gaming fans to engage with the broadcast. The current peak viewership of TikTok has already almost doubled the peak viewership achieved by the platform in 2022. Fully utilising the viewership potential of TikTok may be the key for esports disciplines such as PUBG Mobile to continue their growth and development.

Last Chance, the final stage of the event to be held in Malaysia, kicks off this weekend. After this, the tournament will continue with the Grand Finals stage in Istanbul, Turkey. 16 of the total 48 teams at the event will proceed to the finals, where the 2023 Championship event has the opportunity to outperform last year’s iteration.