How successful was the first Counter-Strike major of 2019?
Using the numbers available in CS:GO’s built-in tournament browser, I came to these figures.
And here are how many people watched each stage of each tournament. The average isn’t
actually this high, since this is an average of the peaks for each match played, but I
use them because they’re easy to obtain and are directly comparable between tournaments.
You can see that the latest major is quite comparable to the previous one in London…
but both of these are down quite a lot when you compare them with the tournaments going
back to 2015.
IS CS:GO DYING?!
Oh not this again. No, I don’t think it’s dying. But let’s try and investigate why
the figures are what they are. For a while there’s been a kind of trend
between good, bad, good, bad, where majors with high viewer figures are separated by
majors that don’t have such impressive stats. Well, we’ve broken the trend guys! A bit.
I mean it hasn’t been BAD, but I don’t think many people would say it’s been particularly
strong either. Let’s try to figure it out.
The grand final viewing figures are the ones that vary the most between tournaments- which
makes sense since they comprise of just 2 or 3 maps. If we remove them from the results
then recent majors look more comparable with earlier ones. I mean, the quarter finals were
still poor, perhaps in part because there weren’t any games that reached a 3rd map.
But the semis were watched by a lot of people- 4th best result ever, actually!
It’s just a shame about the grand final. Why wasn’t it watched as much as in some
of the previous tournaments? HMMM.
…I blame Astralis. They’re too good! The last 2 Grand Finals we’ve seen haven’t
even reached a 3rd map because Astralis has curb stomped the other team in 2 short, brutal
games. They haven’t even been close! This is a breakdown of the peak viewers for
every map of every grand final that has ever been played. Only some of these have blue
bars, which represent the third map played. Those without this blue bar ended after 2
maps. The last 2 majors have no blue bar because Astralis won’t let us have one.
By comparison, the Boston 2018 Grand Final was between Faze and Cloud9, who were a crowd
favourite. It went to a 3rd map and Cloud9 won in double overtime. The viewing figures
were above a million throughout, but that 3rd map peaked at 1.4 million, making it the
most watched game of any CS:GO major ever. The tournament before that, 2017 Krakow, was
the South American Immortals VS Gambit, who were the underdogs… but who ended up winning
on the 3rd map, which broke 1 million concurrent viewers. The viewing figures for the match
still weren’t particularly impressive- but let me tell you, had that game ended earlier
on the 2nd map then the average and peak viewing figures would have been significantly lower.
The grand final before that was Astralis VS Virtus Pro, who were also a fan favourite.
It went on for 3 maps, the last 2 of which were 16-14’s. Spoiler alert, Astralis won.
But it was certainly a good grand final. And Cologne 2016 was SK VS Liquid, but ended
after 2 maps with SK easily winning both. That could be why the grand final figures
aren’t so good for that major. It’s no coincidence that the bars usually
go up with each map played: people want to see which team is going to win the tournament!
That’s not going to happen until at least the 2nd map! And if there’s a 3rd, it has
ALWAYS been the most viewed of the lot. That makes sense, doesn’t it. The match is longer,
so people have more time to tune in. A third map also means that both teams have won a
map, meaning that all fans have seen their favourite team win and are more invested in
the final, deciding map being played. Plus, if both teams have won a map then it’s likely
a more balanced and competitive game, which in turn makes it more exciting.
Just for fun, this is what happens if we remove the 3rd map from the grand finals. Yeah, if
there’s a third map then it really boosts the average and peak viewing figures. This
is only half the story, mind, since you’ve got to remember those remaining 2 maps resulted
in a 1-1 scoreline, so were still more exciting than majors that ended with a 2-0.
To summarise: If the grand final is short, one-sided or
disappointing, then it’s bad for the tournament. It’s bad for the fans watching. It’s bad
for sponsors. And it’s bad in videos such as this one, becoming a bar that’s shorter
than people would like it to be. It might not represent the state of the game, but it
does say a thing or two about the tournament, and about the competitive scene at that particular
moment in time. Which goes back to what I said earlier: Astralis
are too good! They’re stopping the major from benefitting from that third Grand Final
map. So let’s hope for more competition in the next major.
So, we’ve compared the average peak viewing figure for each stage of every tournament.
But what about just the most viewed match at each stage?
For the first time ever, the grand final wasn’t the most viewed moment of the tournament.
For Katowice 2019, it was during the semi finals, Ence VS Navi. And, who’d have thought-
it was during a 3rd map. The only one for this tournament! Every other game played,
from the quarter finals onwards, were 2-0’s. They weren’t all boring matches- there were
a few 16-14’s, and even an overtime, but I do think the absence of matches lasting
till the 3rd map hurts how exciting a tournament is to watch.
It’s probably still better than London 2018 was, mind- that also only had 1 game that
lasted till the 3rd map, but that was only in the quarter finals! We haven’t had such
one-sided matches since… Columbus 2016.
Though it clearly didn’t impact how that major performed!
Why do you watch matches? Hopefully you watch them because you want to watch them. But there
have been, more questionable reasons for doing so as well. In past majors, the longer you
watched the matches for, the more chance you had of randomly getting a drop worth money!
Because of this, people with more than one account MAY have been inclined to idle them
all, to further improve their chances. So the viewing figures in past majors may have
been artificially inflated as a result. And maybe that’s why this major didn’t have
super high viewing numbers in comparison! There were still drops to be had in this major-
but to get them you needed to spend money on a viewer pass, and then had to complete
a series of challenges. These drops were limited to up to 3 per account, depending on how well
you did. Half of these challenges involved picking which teams would win. The other half
still involved you watching matches, but you only had to watch a minute or so from each
stage to get this, so fewer of the viewers watching this tournament at any given time
would be doing so just to get drops. I can’t say how many viewers in the majors
are only there to get drops, or how much of a difference this new pick-em style makes.
But I can say that this is the first major where the first match of the quarter finals
was the most watched from that stage. Maybe people just wanted to watch Faze VS Navi on
Inferno. And as fun as it is to compare numbers from
what it says they are in CS:GO… what if this doesn’t tell the whole story? If you
head on over to ESL’s website, for instance, they claim the tournament peaked at just shy
of 1.2 million viewers. Some how they’ve counted almost 300,000 viewers more! And that’s
still excluding Chinese viewers for some reason. And EVEN THIS isn’t everything! This tournament
was broadcast on TV across the world. I don’t even know how you’d count the number of
viewers who are watching in this way, but that didn’t stop Denmark from publishing
these numbers: in Denmark alone, nearly 100,000 people watched the finals on TV. Who knows
how many more watched this year’s CS:GO Major on last year’s platforms?!
So the good news is, this major was probably viewed more than CS:GO made it out to be.
But there’s a big downside to this as well. It shrouds the actual figures in mystery.
I dislike this as it makes direct comparisons between majors impossible. I see far too many
people relying on the ambiguity of it all to make outrageous claims. Yes, thanks to
TV broadcasts, it could be that this was the most viewed major of all time. Or it could
have paled in comparison to the London Major last year, which was broadcast on Sky Sports.
Other earlier majors had their own agreements and broadcasts. And there’s no way of comparing
them. The most we can say about this is that the
way we view matches is changing. There are many different ways to watch them, and that’s
a good thing! But not if you’re trying to compare viewing numbers between majors.
Now we’ve established that this analysis is deeply flawed, can I just say that I like
what Valve has done with the game recently. You’ve never had to own Counter-Strike to
be able to watch the majors. But I’m sure the game going free to play last December
was part of Valve’s master plan to build a larger playerbase, first to play the game,
and second to bolster viewing numbers at tournaments such as the latest major. The Viewer Pass
was a nice attempt at getting players more involved with the competitive scene, what
with the pick’ems and souvenirs. And there were more ways of viewing the major than ever.
CS:GO, and its tournaments, are more accessible as a result. And that’s a good thing.
Moving away from viewing numbers, let’s look at how CS:GO’s player numbers have
changed this past year. This is the average (and peak) number of players on CS:GO per
month. 2018 was a very interesting period. The middle of the year saw a horrible drop
which I blame on fortnite and its runaway battleroyale success. The spike at the end
is probably from CS:GO becoming free to play and getting battle royale… and now in 2019,
the hype has died down and Apex Legends has come along to steal its playerbase again.
Though it’s probably stealing more from Fortnite’s player numbers.
Yet despite threats from other franchises, I think that CS:GO is in a good place right
now. We’ve accepted that we aren’t the cool kids. We have always been overshadowed
by another games, be it DOTA2, PUBG or Fortnite. But while others have come and gone, CS:GO
has remained remarkably steady over the years, as this recent graph shows. CS:GO is unlikely
to ever suddenly become the most played game in the world. But I don’t see it disappearing
any time soon, either. I always end this kind of video with the same
conclusion: if you want to know how CS:GO’s doing, it’s best to wait until the next
major! But maybe I need to learn to see these majors for what they are. They’re not just
a series of stats for me to predict CS:GO’s future from. Each and every one of these tournaments
is a celebration of the game, for the fans that matter. It’s an excuse to get excited
about something and to share it with likeminded individuals. And we should enjoy it while
it lasts. Katowice 2019: Not the biggest major the game
has ever had. Or maybe it is thanks to millions of grannies tuning in to it on TV, and the
20 or so people who watched it on facebook. But really… how much do viewing figures
even matter to you? How does it impact your experience when you’re watching your favourite
teams battling it out, live? Let me know what you think in the comments section below.
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