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The Electronic Sports League (ESL) has announced that their Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) Katowice event two weeks ago was a huge success. The Intel Extreme Masters World Championship and the EMS One Katowice broke a number of ESL broadcast records, with over 500,000 tuning into theLeague of Legends championship final between KT Rolster Bullets and Fnatic on Twitch.
The previous record was 302,000 concurrent viewers, set at the 2013 at IEM Cologne.
Concurrent viewership across all of the events games was even higher, peaking at 643,000 on Twitch, with a projected total of over a million across all broadcasting platforms. All together, viewers from over 180 countries watched over produced 23,164,454 video plays and consumed 12,648,666 hours of eSports action, making this the most successful ESL event in the company’s history.
“It was only six or seven years ago that we were happy to see 12,000 concurrent online viewers on a single match,” said Michał Blicharz, Managing Director of Pro Gaming at ESL. “We had 12,000 watching matches live in Katowice and hundreds of thousands online. This growth is simply mindblowing.”
“Esports events now regularly attract a global audience which rivals cable and broadcast television-sized audiences,” said Stuart Saw, Regional Director, EMEA, Twitch. “Intel Extreme Masters World Championship is one of the industry’s premier events and is a standard-bearer for its high level of gameplay, production quality, and audience engagement. As testament, the traffic achieved during this event achieved a record concurrent viewership for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and one of the highest single-stream concurrent viewer count for League of Legends.”
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