During the New Year holiday season, an extremely interesting event was held in the western Ukraine. Aside of being the first DPC series' event for the guys from WePlay! Esports, it became the most popular event of the minor series. We will look at the achievements of this championship in more detail in today's summary.

But first let's mention the winners of the championship: the Nigma team. In the final match, the former world champions have defeated the Royal Never Give Up team. The winners have received an invitation to the DreamLeague Leipzig Major along with the prize of 72 thousand dollars.

The achievements of WePlay! Bukovel Minor are pleasantly surprising. In stark contrast to the season's debut event (which was a major) the current event shows the best performance in the series ever since the appearance of the DPC system. This is true for all the three indicators: peak viewers, average viewers and hours watched.

Matching this event most closely is the championship from DreamHack. The DreamLeague Season 10 features 228 thousand peak viewers and 77 thousand average viewers. When it comes to the Ukrainian minor, the peak viewers mark is not much different, however the average viewers mark is higher by whole 20%.

In the case of these two events, the role of the Russian streams is somewhat ambiguous. WePlay! Bukovel Minor is 23% behind its opponent in terms of the peak viewers – but the DreamLeague is almost 27% behind in terms of the average viewers.

The participation of Natus Vincere in the final match of the Swedish championship was what caused such a situation; everything could be quite different in case Gambit managed to get to the Bukovel Minor finals.

This argument actually works in both directions. The audience from the Southeast Asia region was more interested in the finals of the 10th season of DreamLeague due to the participation of a team from same region (Tigers). Meanwhile, the Indonesian broadcast of WePlay! Esports shows a decrease for both the peak (41%) and average viewers indicator (45%).

When looking at the overall Internet reception of Bukovel Minor, we can say that it was quite warm. Despite being the first developer-supported tournament for its organizers, it has turned out to be extremely interesting. WePlay! even took care of the official Ukrainian-language broadcast of the event, with a locally well-known personality, yXo, acting as its host.

The strengths of the event were noted by some of the commentators. While their positive reviews have touched on many points, the main focus was on the event's creative decisions as well as its location.

However, not everything was perfect. The schedule became a real problem for the event, with a single game day beginning during daytime and ending late at night (even according to the local time). While the organizers have stated that the players haven't expressed much dissatisfaction with the schedule, it is obvious that this would make the audience much less keen on following the event.

There is another important point regarding this championship: being a native CIS competition, it had a visible change to the list of participants. This time the region has received two spots for its teams – but even this didn't help the local teams. Team Spirit did not manage to pass the group stage, while Gambit Esports has left the championship during the first playoff stage.

Talking about the teams, it makes sense to list the top most popular participants of this championship. The guys from Nigma have claimed the top spot in terms of average viewers. The matches of the future champions have shown superior results multiple times. The silver spot was claimed by RNG, the second finalist of this minor. Closing the top three was the Fighting PandaS team.

An interesting tidbit about the path of “pandas” to the top: theirs was the only team from the top 5 to not qualify for the playoffs. Additionally, top 5 has featured only a single team from the CIS – Gambit Esports.

Overall, we can say that the WePlay! Bukovel Minor was successful, managing to reverse the late negative trend and show that the events of this class are quite capable for gathering a sizable number of viewers.