Counter Strike: Global Offensive is considered to be one of the most popular esports discipline in the world. The biggest advantage in its simplicity — any person, even who is far from gaming, can understand what is this game about and what should players do to win. That is why CS:GO is the first and the only one competitive video game in the world, which has direct contact and cooperation with the US television. ELEAGUE is a best proof of this fact since it works with TBS, a major American television channel.

A key feature of ELEAGUE Major 2018 is a new tournament format since Valve requested offline qualifications became a full-fledged part of the Major. Valve has also announced a new names for all the stages of the tournament: The New Challengers Stage (Offline Qualifiers), The New Legends Stage (Group Stages) and The New Champions Stage (playoffs). Thus the amount of teams at the Major Tournaments increased from 16 to 24 and every team received their own purchasable stickers.

Tournament had a top rated list of participants with quality approach to production thus it was bound to succeed. ELEAGUE Major 2018 culminated in the grand-final — for the first time in the history of esports the US players won the Major CS:GO tournament! Americans from Cloud9 took the first place at the home tournament! It sounds like a fairy tail, so it is hard to imagine what the viewers in Boston was feeling at this moment.

ELEAGUE Major 2018 became the most popular tournament in the history of competitive CS:GO among non-Chinese viewers with 1.342.107 people online. Before that the last record belonged to ELEAGUE 2017. However, the average amount of viewers fell down since many people didn’t hurry to watch every single match during the group stage. Playoff changed everything — hundreds of thousands of viewers watched every match between eight best teams in the world.

The most interesting is that ELEAGUE Major 2018 takes second place in the list of the most popular tournaments if we count Chinese viewers. There was a big boom in Chinese community in PGL Major Kraków 2017 — more than half of all viewers were from the Middle Kingdom. ELEAGUE Major 2018 wasn’t so popular in China — the amount of Chinese viewers has dropped by half. The main reason of this fall is the large time zones difference: ELEAGUE Major 2018 was held in America thus the Chinese could watch it only late at night. PGL Major Kraków 2017 was held in Europe, which means that it was easier for viewers from the Middle Kingdom to watch the tournament online. It should be reminded that Counter Strike: Global Offensive released officially in China in September 2017. We thought that Chinese CS:GO audience will become much more bigger in a few months, but it didn’t happen. CS:GO is growing rapidly as an esports discipline in the Middle Kingdom, so it will be interesting to see what will happen in a couple of years.

TyLoo is the most popular Chinese CS:GO team, but their players couldn’t participate the tournament because of visa problems. Flash Gaming joined the tournament instead of TyLoo. Flash Gaming is not the strongest team in the region, they couldn’t show a decent game so they left the tournament in the group stage. If TyLoo had joined the tournament, we would have expected much more activity from Chinese viewers.

ELEAGUE Major 2018 will most likely become the most popular CS:GO tournament in 2018. From that time the last region which didn’t take the first place in CS:GO Majors is Asia (if we count Gambit as a European team) and, more specifically, China. Players from there shouldn’t be underestimated — one day they will become a powerful force in CS:GO competitive scene.