IEM Rio 2023 general impressions

For a lot of CS:GO fans, and especially those of FURIA Esports, Natus Vincere, and Heroic, IEM Rio 2023 was a painful event to watch. But if we ignore the results and the dramatic moments, this was another big success for ESL and Valve.

IEM Rio 2023 featured 16 highly-skilled teams and at least half a dozen of them could have easily won. In the playoffs, the results were extremely close and the difference was often made by tiny errors, brilliant plays, or even luck.

The Brazilian audience was just as hyped as it was six months ago, at IEM Rio Major. Unfortunately, the heartbreaking moment between FURIA Esports and Heroic repeated and it was hard to watch. An entire arena felt like the people who watched Brazil’s football team lose against Germany with a score of 1-7 at FIFA World Cup 2014.

General impressions

Team Vitality, who ended up winning the tournament at the end of a long and dramatic run, truly deserved their win. It’s been almost seven months since Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut and his teammates won an S-tier tournament and this trophy is probably a confidence booster ahead of the Paris Major.

On their way to winning the tournament, Vitality defeated teams like FaZe Clan, OG, BIG, Cloud9, and Heroic. Every one of these was a best-of-three elimination match, which makes their victories even more relevant.

For Heroic, it must have been tough to lose again after such a spectacular run. They were defeated in the Grand Final of IEM Rio Major last year and IEM Katowice this year. Now they lost another Grand Final and we’re starting to wonder how many more failures can they take before the motivation to train hard starts to disappear.

In their current form, Heroic could easily beat most of the world’s best teams. But that form is highly dependent on the players’ insane work ethic. With just a few weeks left until the Paris Major, Casper “cadiaN” Moller will need to make sure that his squad is focused and unaffected by this loss.

The viewership of IEM Rio 2023 was decent. According to Escharts, the tournament had 562.000 viewers at its peak, which is not bad at all considering it took place in Brazil, whose time zone is six hours behind Europe. The average viewers number was also good: ~250.000.

CS:GO’s player base has grown a lot in the last 12 months, so tournament organizers are probably hoping to see their numbers improve as well in the near future.

Header: ESL