PGL ranks second most valuable esports tournament organizer

In its recent analysis of the popularity of esports tournament organizers, Esports Charts deemed PGL as the second most expensive independent esports tournament operator, following the newly formed ESL FACEIT Group. 

While both ESL and FACEIT are big operators highly-recognized in the esports industry, the current value of the newly formed ESL FACEIT Group comes from the biggest deal in esports history that took place back in January 2022. The deal saw the Savvy Gaming Group, a subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, acquire ESL Gaming, including DreamHack, and FACEIT for $1.5 billion and merge them to create the most valuable esports company in the market. 

Based on the $1.5 billion that’s been paid to create the ESL FACEIT Group, as well as on the viewership data from tournaments between 2020 to 2021 and other various metrics, Esports Charts estimated the cost of one hour watched and calculated the worth of other tournament organizers. 

PGL’s success

Following the ESL FACEIT Group, the second most valuable independent tournament operator globally according to Esports Charts is PGL, with an estimated worth of $540,577,537. The Romanian company is mostly known as one of Valve’s main contractors, organising tournaments in CS:GO and Dota 2, but also in Apex Legends and other smaller titles such as Quake Champions and Brawl Stars. Furthermore, PGL functions as a non-public organizer of Dota 2’s biggest event — The International. 

In terms of viewership numbers, PGL hosted the two biggest events in CS:GO history — the  PGL Stockholm Major 2021 and the recent PGL Major Antwerp 2022, respectively. The former amassed more than 2.7 million concurrent viewers, while the latter reached over 2.1 million, with an attendance of more than 40,000 in-person visitors during playoffs.

Following the success of both events, PGL is now reportedly looking to further bolster its position in the esports market. Silviu Stroie, the CEO of PGL, spoke on the result of the analysis: 

“We’re thrilled and passionate about esports growing organically and sustainably. We saw clear evidence of that at the PGL Antwerp Major, which broke records with the biggest esport audience in an indoor arena. We’ve seen esport events reach as many as 100 million people, and I’m pretty sure that in a couple of years, we are going to have 500 million to 1 billion people following a specific esport tournament.”

“The next generation of esport games will start to come out in the next few years. And this whole new generation is going to move everything to a whole new level. 2023 is already all booked out. And we are making plans for 2024.”

Value of TOs

The following ranks in the analysis by Esports Charts included BLAST with an estimated value of $314 million, followed by KeSPA ($297.7 million), VSPN ($280.2 million) and Twitch Rivals ($245.2 million). 

Since the calculations were based only on viewership results of tournaments and don’t take into account other projects of these companies that cannot be measured by their popularity with the online audience, these estimates don’t correspond with the real financial value of said companies. That said, the main value of tournament operators is in the events that are watched by thousands of viewers on streaming services.

Header: PGL