Street Fighter 6 events dominate most-watched FGC events in Q1 2024

Street Fighter 6, Capcom’s newest flagship FGC title, dominated the most-watched fighting games of the first quarter of 2024, based on data from Esports Charts.

The global esports statistics provider tracked that Street Fighter was played in 3 of the top 5 events.

 

“With the release of Street Fighter 6 in 2023, Capcom has been pushing and growing the esports scene for the Street Fighter franchise. Their recent Capcom Cup X featured the largest prize pool in the series’ history: $1,000,000 for first place and over $1,700,000 overall,” Esports Charts noted.

 

Leading the overall pack is the Capcom Cup X, which totaled close to 4 million esports hours watched. This means the amount of time or content that fans spent on watching the said tournament. 

“The Capcom Cup X the culmination of the 2023 Capcom Pro Tour. Directly organised by Capcom themselves, this Street Fighter 6 event received 3.91M Hours Watched, making it the most-watched fighting game esports tournament of 2024 so far,” Esports Charts noted.

At second place is the Capcom Cup X Last Chance Qualifier, which allowed for a do-or-die battle in Street Fighter 6’s grandest stage. “the event welcomed 48 players, one of which was the lucky winner of the Capcom Cup X Last Chance Qualifier. Problem X, the winner of the event, advanced to the Capcom Cup X, where he finished 25th-32nd. The LCQ event generated 1.89M Hours Watched, cementing Capcom’s domination of the first quarter of the year,” Esports Charts said in its report.

The third and fourth place in the most-watched fighting games belong to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros.

At third place is the Genesis X Ultimate, which generated 1.22 million hours watched, despite having a smaller prize pool than the Brawl event. At fourth place, meanwhile, is the Umebura SP10 tournament garnered close to 1 million esports hours viewed, and was joined by over 1,200 participants in Tokyo, Japan. This tournament was hosted by Japanese pro player, Shimizu “Umeki” Masaki.

 

“Many of these participants were established international players, and the event featured both strong international and national competition. The event fell just short of million hours of watch time, having received 989.6K Hours Watched, making it the second-most-watched Smash Ultimate event of the quarter,” Esports Charts said.

Meanwhile, the Red Bull Kumite 2024 in New York offered US$50,000 in prizes and had big-name talents play in high-level Street Fighter action. Chris Wong, who was the Capcom Cup X runner-up, finished at 5th-8th place in the event.

“Powered by the fierce competition, the 2024 New York edition became the second-most-watched Red Bull Kumite ever with 840.2K Hours Watched,” Esports Charts said.

 

 

Street Fighter’s hype is also amplified by Esports Charts’ observation of peak viewership for the FGC titles, as Capcom Cup X leads the pack with over 311,000 peak viewers. 

It is also the only FGC title that broke the 100,000 peak viewership mark for the quarter, with events such as the Street Fighter League World Championship reaching close to 180,000, the Capcom Cup X LCQ at over 131,000, the CPT 2023 Online Event: Japan at 124,500, and the Red Bull Kumite 2024 New York at over 109,000.

 

Esports Charts noted how the Street Fighter League World Championship and the CPT 2023 highlight the power of Japan’s audience in fighting games, most specifically for Street Fighter.

“The League World Championship 2023 was the final tournament of the 2023 Street Fighter League season. The tournament invited the best teams from the three major regions which host teams from various countries: United States, Europe, and Japan. FAV gaming was Japan’s representative for the event, and the Japanese audience contributed heavily to the event’s 179.6K Peak Viewers,” Esports Charts said.

They also noted that the CPT 2023 Online was the final official regional tournament for Japan in 2023: or so it was planned, until network issues disrupted the event, moving it to the first quarter of 2024. 

“The tournament eventually took place in early January and generated 124.6K Peak Viewers for its final match between Kawano and Otaini. This tournament actually took place during the same weekend as the Umebura SP10. With split attention, the fighting game community in Japan delivered two of Q1’s top fighting game events in only one weekend,” Esports Charts said.

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.