According to Statista, it is estimated that there are over 450 million esports fans worldwide, of whom 201 million are religious to the sport. It’s an unbelievably large audience, but what do they do?
That’s just one of the questions we’re going to answer as we look into the major esports tournaments. There are several ways to work this out, but we’ll look at the most important tournaments on the global esports scene and which events will draw even more viewers in the near future.
Recently, CSGO broke its record with 950,000+ active players in one single day. Almost reaching 1,000,000.
The unpopularity of the game in China and global support for Europe and America are a central feature of it. Therefore, in all CSGO tournaments, the overall number of visitors is considerably lower, but if you do not compare the Chinese audience the shooter is more than comparable.
For example, Betway offers a wide range of comparisons on esports betting sites for CSGO, which evidently shows how interesting different industries want to collaborate with esports.
CSGO hosted two major tournaments, the biggest esports championships of the year, in the largest and most important event in the series ELEAGUE Major: Boston 2018. The conventional tournament. The tournament is the most famous of the CSGO esports history without Chinese viewers. For the first time in history, the American team won the major American tournaments which gave English-speaking spectators a huge impetus. During the playoffs, 1,131,990 people were seen concurrently in English on Twitch, records from the background of live broadcasts up to the Fortnite stream of Ninja and Drake.
ELEAGUE is working with American TV, which carries and presents the event in an extraordinarily high fashion, in the same way as the biggest classic sport championships. You can have a new record for the discipline by the next ELEAGUE Major. The process starts on 26 January 2019, so waiting is not long.
FACEIT Major London 2018 was the second key tournament of the year. It has been almost 2 times less popular than ELEAGUE Major in terms of performance. In Boston 2018, however, the participation of Natus Vincere in the final ranking has resulted in anomalous activities of Russian-speaking viewers. The event itself plays an important historical role as the CS: GO esports scene formed the Astralis period.
In addition to major tournaments, there are hundreds, thousands of small tournaments. The CSGO Esports scene is very mature and diversified. ESL Pro League series matches, for example, can boast enviable regularity. The final season of the ESL Pro League took 121,581 viewers to the top, 2/3 of whom are Russians. The problem is that only on Twitter, which strongly repels a significant number of viewers, are English broadcasts of ESL tournaments.
Most Watched CSGO Tournaments
2019 was a crazy year and 2020 is going to be even bigger, when CS GO esports, Astralis and Team Liquid, saw two dominant forces steal the headlines. The Katowice Major stole the title as the most-watched CSGO tournament of the year, and hundreds of tournaments have been and are gone now.
The three most-watched tournaments worldwide were:
Peak viewers: 1.2 million
- StarLadder Major Berlin 2019
Peak viewers: 838k
Peak viewers: 506k
The bookies have expected to have received tens of thousands of bets in these major Tournaments
How Do The Tournaments Influence Esports Betting?
As CS GO has been around for many years, it’s diversified with small and some major tournaments will hundreds of thousands of viewers. Some informal betting sites like ‘CSGOLounge’ have offered insecure and unregulated ‘skin betting’ for many years.
Players tend to shy away from these sites due to their shady and unregulated presence. Valve stopped and removed orders from certain websites thus preventing other sites from making deposits or withdrawals. Internet service providers have been forced to block access to many well-known skin betting websites in Denmark.
Valve has clearly and is attempting to shut down these skin betting sites due to fears that links to gambling and children under 18 are playing on these sites.
The decline of sites like CSGOLounge has not been caused due to the lack of game-play but interference from other factors such as Valve and competition from mainstream esports betting sites and informal betting sites.
Fears have also grown due to match-fixing and the feasibility of rigging these skin gambling and processing illegally money through the game. Valve has announced their worries in this. One recent case involving an AVANGAR Content Manager who sent a direct message to Kristian “k0nfig” Wienecke telling him to kill himself following a $300 bet using a skin gambling site.
