COVID-19 transformed the entire world in a few months. Most countries have been locked down in their entirety and people have been forced to adapt to a new way of being. The esports scene has not escaped the impact of COVID-19 either.
The disruption has caused almost all LAN tournaments to either be cancelled or postponed. Some of the tournaments have taken place online and had run relatively smoothly with a significant increase in esports viewership.
An excellent example of the new ‘COVID-19 REALITY’ in esports, was the innovative Flashpoint tournament. This was the brainchild of a number of popular esport teams having joined forced to form B Site, Inc., with the launch of Flashpoint, a new creative project for the CS:GO supporters.
Artyom Odintsov, CEO of Esports Charts says: “Esports Charts is pleased to join the initiative of our market colleagues and to contribute to the progress of Flashpoint with our expertise and, of course, analytical data. “Endeavors such as Flashpoint are always commendable and are an example that should be emulated”.
The popularity of the tournament was mostly due to the diversity of the competitors as there was representation from Europe, Asia, North and South America, and games were broadcast in English, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and various other languages. Viewers’ statistics showed that Brazilians formed the largest number of the total audience.
Adding to the success of the Portuguese broadcast, was the brilliant Brazilian MIBR team who attracted viewership of 282K in one single match, with recurring viewership averaging 92K for the rest of their games. Their closest competitor was MAD Lions, attracting an average of 57K viewers.
Having participated in four out of the five most popular matches of the tournament, the Brazilian superstar team MIBR were outright leaders.
The final match in the Flashpoint Season 1, to no one’s surprise, was MIBR versus MAD Lions, a match that attracted a record number of viewers.
Esports will provide a final, detailed update of all data and tournament statistics to all the league players, which will allow an assessment of the success and feasibility of Flashpoint as a new innovation as well as each individual team.
President of Cloud9 and B Site co-founder Dan Fiden stated, “It’s fantastic to have Esports Charts on board to provide best-in-class viewership analytics to both our teams and our sponsorship partners. The tools and data they provide are crucial to fine-tuning our operations to continually improve our content for fans.”
