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The BLAST Premier World Final 2022, a major LAN tournament for the competitive game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, has seen a decline in viewership compared to previous years.
The event took place over the weekend and was the final large LAN tournament of the year in the CS:GO calendar.
According to Esports Charts, the data aggregating platform, the esports tournament reached a peak of 378,000 viewers, with G2 Esports taking home the trophy.
The organization took to its Twitter page to announce the viewership numbers of the 2022 BLAST Premier World Final and made the statistics available on its website.
“377K Peak Viewers on #BLASTPremier World Final 2022. @G2esports vs @TeamLiquid is the most popular match of the event,” esports charts tweeted.
The BLAST Premier World Final is the final event in the BLAST tournament series for the season and brings together the top teams from the previous year’s competition to compete for a prize pool of $1m. This event, which was first held in 2021, replaced the BLAST Premier Global Final and features Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) teams.
With the 2022 BLAST Premier World Final garnering a peak viewership of 378,000, the tournament ranks at 14th place on the global final ranking among other BLAST events. This is lower than the viewership of both the Spring and Fall groups and finals in 2022, which were smaller-scale events with prize pools of $425,000 compared to the World Final’s prize pool of $1 million.
This suggests that the size of the prize pool and the scale of the event may not necessarily be the main factors driving viewership. It is possible that other factors, such as the popularity of the game or the specific teams or players involved, played a role in the viewership for the World Final.
Viewership for the BLAST Premier World Final 2022 saw a significant drop compared to the previous edition, with just 378,000 viewers tuning in compared to the 727,000 viewers for the 2021 tournament. The grand final match between G2 Esports and Team Liquid was the most-watched match of the tournament.
The BLAST Premier World Final 2022 has not attracted as many viewers as the IEM Cologne 2022 and IEM Katowice 2022 tournaments, which were both organized by BLAST’s competitor, ESL Gaming, and featured a $1 million prize pool for the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Both of these tournaments had a significantly higher number of views, with over one million people tuning in.
The BLAST Premier World Final 2022 was held in Abu Dhabi, which has faced controversy and criticism from some, including prominent figures in the esports industry like Richard Lewis, due to human rights violations and other issues. The United Arab Emirates, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have faced backlash for being given hosting rights for major events such as the Football World Cup, because of their human rights records.
