250,000 people watched Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at last year’s Intel Extreme Masters. This year more than 1 million people tuned in.
Following the tournament, almost 600,000 people were playing the game concurrently through Steam.
Clearly, 2015’s starting out as a very strong year for Valve’s shooter.
This weekend saw the Intel Extreme Masters tournament, a huge eSports tournament, this year being hosted in Katowice, Poland. Along with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, there were games of StarCraft 2 and League of Legends being played at the event.
Last year CS:GO brought more than 250,000 viewers, a huge achievement for the shooter, bat that’s nothing compared to this year’s 1,000,000.
The peak CCU for CSGO in Katowice rose from 250K to 1M in the space of 12 months. #perspective #ESLOne
— Michal Blicharz (@mbCARMAC) March 15, 2015
Another fascinating stat to come out of the event is the Starcraft 2 viewers. IEM was 1,000 viewers short of beating Blizzcon’s own viewing numbers.
Wow! #IEM StarCraft2 almost beat Blizzcon World Championship when it comes to peak concurrent viewers. Blizzcon:155,435 IEM SC2: 154,403
— Simon Sundén (@joinsimon) March 15, 2015
I hadn’t realised that CS:GO was so much more popular to watch than Starcraft 2, considering Starcraft’s been a pillar of the eSports community for more than a decade.
The Daily Dot also note that the weekend saw a new all-time peak for CS:GO concurrent players. 595,439 players logged in to Steam on Sunday to play Valve’s shooter.