The ninth edition of the Gamoloco Dataviz Monday Review features the most watched Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) events.

The infographic shows that MLG Columbus, the first CS:GO tournament which offered one million USD prize money, set a new record regarding total hours watched in total. Moreover it shows that the so-called “major events” have proved a recipe for high attendance figures (in terms of hours watched).

MLG Columbus records 37M Hours Watched

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Message from the author

Nicolas Cerrato

gamoloco

Founder & CEO

“The MLG Major in Columbus, the 1st one with $1 000 000 cash prize, took place last week and, according to our measurements, recorded a very impressive 37M Hours Watched on Twitch as you can see at the far right of the graph.

The event came as an occasion to keep working on the CSGO Events comparison started a few weeks ago: not only did add MLG Columbus, we could also display data for both ESL One’s of 2015, which we had measured back then. Adding those events, also Valve-sanctionned Majors, leads to one conclusion: Majors are awesomely powerful at generating big viewerships.

It is quite important to understand when looking at this graph that none of these events is small: here for 2016, we display the top 5 events of the year so far. It’s just that Majors not only go through the roof, they also touch the sky. Especially I remember the production value of the Starseries Finals which was very impressive, very Major-like.

By acknowledging a few events each year, and by seducing players into watching them through in-game interactions, Valve has allowed a unique phenomenon to blossom. Well… unique in video games but come to think about it: the CSGO Esports Events scene looks a lot like the ATP Tour in tennis: many small events, some mid-sized events, few world-size events and only 3 Majors per year standing in for Grand Slams.

If you’re curious about our method, please take a look at the little writings at the bottom of the visual or browse the data set.”

About Gamoloco

gamoloco provides viewership data for gaming live streams hosted on major dedicated platforms such as twitch.tv, hitbox.tv, azubu.tv and more platforms. The collected data is used to create scoreboards for channels on the one hand and games on the other hand. Gamoloco also uses the data to provide dedicated Game pages. Gamoloco numbers are directly taken from the platforms’ API’s and represent more than 98% of the total viewership.

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