Jade Dragons complete underdog story as game’s sequel gets reveal at SMITE World Championship Season X

Loading

The SMITE World Championship Season X was recently held at the Esports Stadium Arlington in Texas from January 4 to 15. Although there was plenty of hype and an entertaining sideshow on offer, with the championship event also being a LAN affair, it put up modest numbers compared to its predecessors.

The tenth season of Smite's esports journey saw eight teams come through a hard-fought qualification path for a chance to compete for the title of world champion. This also included events like the SMITE Pro League and SCC Championship, while the SWC Group Stages Stages was the final qualification opportunity for this mega event.

Adding to the sense of occasion was the announcement of Smite 2 by the event organizer and the game's developer Hi-Rez Studios. This meant that 2023 was possibly the last one with esports coming out of the first installment, and the world championship could be its last tournament.

At the end of three days of intense action, Jade Dragons edged past the so-far dominant Oni Warriors 3:2 to emerge as the new world champion. It was quite the upset, for the latter had utterly dominated the competition until that point, remaining unbeaten and untouched across the entire final phase thanks to easy 2:0 and 3:0 victories.

  Most popular games and essential stats from the SMITE World Championship Season X   

With such high stakes and the dichotomy of the two teams involved, The SMITE World Championship Season X recorded 56.7K Peak Viewers during the summit clash. The tournament winner had three appearances in the most popular matches list, the highest number, while a pair of sides enjoyed two entries each.

This Smite event also registered 1.6M Hours Watched and 24.7K Average Viewers over 67 hours of airtime. Intriguingly for long-time fans of this popular game, the final day began with a fun session involving its developers and a few audience members building an imaginary God (called Bake Neko) before a Smite 2 Dev Insight panel showed those present how the upcoming sequel looks, plays, and what they could expect from the Legacy gems.

When talking about the popularity of the sides, only two crossed the 40K AV mark, although one of the finalists was not among this duo. The number one team here also topped the watch time leaderboard, doing significantly higher numbers than any other participant.

Moving to platforms, Twitch had a much higher share than its competition, with the game's official handle also emerging as the most successful channel. Lastly, at the SMITE World Championship 2023, Spanish overtook English in terms of peak concurrent viewership, but there was no repeat this time around, with the latter reaching 5.8% times more people to reassert its supremacy in a predominantly English-dominated discipline.

  Most popular Smite tournaments of all time   

The SMITE World Championship Season X ended seventh and sixth on the Hours Watched and Peak Viewers tables, respectively, when looking at the most successful competitions in the game. While the SMITE World Championship 2021 is the leader in terms of watch time, the OTK SMITE Invitational from 2022 is atop the latter list.

Interestingly, there were Twitch drops available for viewers of this tournament, but that didn't really help attract extra fans to the action. It has to be mentioned that this was the second straight edition that saw audiences back in person to watch the matches live, so expecting the numbers to reach the levels they did during the pandemic era (some of the most successful competitions in the game came in this phase) was always a step too far.

The peak of the development of the SMITE professional scene came in 2015-2017 when the teams competed for millions of dollars in prize money at the world championships, and the rosters of top esports clubs like Cloud9, SK Gaming, NRG Esports, Team Dignitas, Luminosity Gaming, etc. were represented in the discipline. Now many top organizations have left SMITE, and the tournaments feature much smaller prize pools; all this has directly affected audience reach.