First-ever CS2 Major records over 15M esports hours watched

The world is indeed watching – and watching bigtime – the PGL Major Copenhagen – the inaugural Major for Counter-Strike 2, based on new data released by Esports Charts.

The esports statistics provider released new data March 21st that recorded a whopping 15.48 million esports hours watched – one of the most-watched events for esports in the year so far.

 

Despite changes in formats following the launch of CS2, such as Valve asking all teams to compete and qualify via RMR events, the Elimination stage proved to be the barrier that allowed more views, thanks to the best of the best in CS2 being present in Eliminations.

“This has slightly stacked viewership against the Opening Stage, as the world’s best and most popular teams did not compete during the stage,” Esports Charts noted in its report.

“The 15.48M HW generated by the Opening Stage does represent a 14.5% decrease in watch time compared to the previous Major, however, the ongoing PGL Major featured far fewer broadcasting hours. In terms of average concurrent viewership, the Copenhagen Major received 420.3K Average Viewers, which marked a negligible 0.7% increase in viewership for the stage,” Esports Charts added.

However, Esports Charts also noted that there have been some other decreases in viewership. They report that the English broadcasts for the Copenhagen Major are down by as much as 40.4%, at only over 244,000 peak viewers.

“This figure is more representative of a lower interest in the Opening Stage from global audiences than a decreasing English-language audience, and as the Elimination Stage and eventual Playoffs progress, English-language viewership will likely rise significantly,” Esports Charts said.

The Russian broadcasts, meanwhile, got leaps in terms of viewership compared to the Paris Major, Esports Charts noted. The rise of national teams such as Cloud9 and IEM Katowice 2024 champions Team Spirit contributed to an 81.2% increase in Russian-language viewership.

“Cloud9 has been performing strongly since the beginning of 2024, and their success has built them a decent following among fans,” Esports Charts noted. They add, “Team Spirit is also one of Counter-Strike’s most popular teams at the moment after their, and specifically donk’s, dominant performance at IEM Katowice 2024. The team’s debut during the Elimination Stage will likely bring an even larger increase in Russian-language viewership.”

Both Mongolian and Polish broadcasts, meanwhile, have also shown significant growth in viewership during the Copenhagen Major, also according to Esports Charts’ data.

“Mongolian broadcasts growing in popularity coincides with the mono-national Mongolian The MongolZ surpassing the expectations of many. The team has even qualified for the Elimination Stage. At 30K Peak Viewers, the tournament set a new Counter-Strike viewership record for the language, and this may even be broken once again during the next stage,” they noted.

ENCE’s competitive success has also contributed to a boost in the Major’s popularity among Polish fans, as well as IzakOOO, who helped boost viewership for the Polish-language casts during ENCE’s matches.

“IzakOOO was by far the most popular Polish-language broadcaster of the event, and he reached his peak viewership while watching ENCE’s game against Imperial. Although ENCE is a Finnish esports organization, four of its current players are Polish, and IzakOOO and his fans were proudly supporting them on stream,” Esports Charts noted, saying that both of his Twitch and YouTube streams garnered a combined 110,000 concurrent live viewers.

Meanwhile, Portuguese broadcasts were primarily viewed on Gaules’ social media channels, but this did not almost materialize after Gaules almost lost broadcasting rights. “Gaules was eventually given the green light to stream and he did not disappoint: he received 207.6K Peak Viewers for his coverage of FURIA’s game against SAW,” Esports Charts noted.

The official PGL broadcasts were the second, fourth, and fifth most popular channels to broadcast the tournament, receiving 105.9K, 60.6K, and 57.4K Peak Viewers respectively. The PGL Twitch channel earned its peak viewership thanks to Cloud9’s match against SAW, and the B-stream PGL_CS2 received 60.6K PV during Ecstatic’s match against Imperial.

All of the statistics noted in Esports Charts’ latest report do not include Steam.tv statistics, citing an autoplay function which drastically overinflates the actual viewership received by the platform.