CS2: Esports World Cup qualifiers reach 1M total hours watched despite low official channel viewership

Tournaments on the road to the biggest esports event in history are getting some traction online despite lower viewership on official broadcast channels.

Data from global esports statistics provider Esports Charts show that open regional qualifiers for the Esports World Cup CS2 tournament garnered a total of over 1.03 million hours watched.

However, this figure was also reflective of low overall viewership in official channels, with broadcast trends pointing to community casters boosting awareness and viewership.

“Although the events did break the 1M HW barrier, the viewership for the events was disappointing and largely fueled by popular co-streaming content creators. The official EWC broadcasts for the events received shockingly low viewership, excluding some events where the EWC broadcasts were essentially the only broadcast available,” Esports Charts stated in its report.

Based on this chart from Esports Charts, only the South American tournaments garnered significant attention from the global audience, with the closed qualifier garnering a total of over 343,000 hours watched over close to 17 hours of total airtime.

The open qualifier, meanwhile, was at a distant second, at over 260,000 hours watched over 10 hours of total airtime.

“This high viewership was almost entirely thanks to Gaules and his community of co-streams for these competitions. The Brazilian streamer generated over 50.5K concurrent viewers for his personal Twitch channel alone throughout the Closed Qualifier, contributing the vast majority of viewers to this tournament,” based on Esports Charts’ report.

Esports Charts also noted that the South American closed qualifier, particularly its Portuguese-speaking audience, was critical for the overall viewership of these qualifier events, and Portuguese-speaking audiences alone received 52.4K concurrent viewers at peak. 

“These Portuguese viewers came largely from community casters, and community casters generated 95.7% of the total watch time generated by the South American Closed Qualifiers,” Esports Charts noted.

In addition, Esports Charts observed that Twitch was also much more favored than YouTube for viewers of these events. The Asian and Oceanic tournaments received much smaller viewership than the South American and European events, and these Eastern audiences are usually preferential to YouTube-based broadcasts. 

Asia’s closed qualifier garnered only over 32,000 hours watched – only one-tenth or more of the overall viewership hours for the main South American tournament.

The NA open qualifier, meanwhile, had less than half of Asia’s viewership, at over 13,000 hours watched.

Esports Charts attributes this to a lack of community casters from the region. 

“The EWC came under criticism particularly for missing some matches entirely, such as the Upper Bracket Semifinal between M80 and eLevate at the North American qualifier which was not broadcast by any channel. This problem persisted around the globe, with many first stage playoffs matches being ignored entirely,” Esports Charts noted in its report.

They add, “the shortcomings of the event organization resulted in abnormally low viewership for this event, and antagonized North American fans of Counter-Strike looking to watch some of the best teams of their region compete for qualification.”

Oceania’s viewership was even more dismal, at over 10,700 hours.

“The viewership distribution by platform reflects the heavily Western-sided viewership for Counter-Strike,” Esports Charts also noted.

Data from Chinese streaming platforms are not included in the computation, due to the unreliability of numbers from the said platform.

More esports tournament data may be accessed through the Esports Charts website at escharts.com.