Esports World Cup a success by most metrics – Our Review and EWC 2025 Wishlist
After months of intense esports competition, the Esports World Cup finally concluded with a promise to return on a yearly basis. After its “debut” on the esports calendar, we’re taking a moment to dive into all the details, the viewership & our wishlist for the Esports World Cup in 2025.
EWC 2024 painted a pretty picture
Without a doubt, the best thing about EWC was the fact sheet around the tournament. As outlined through our extensive Esports World Cup betting coverage, the festival featured a $60 million EWC prize pool, 21 tournaments and hundreds of professional competitors from across the world.
By inviting the best teams in the world, each tournament had the ingredients to succeed as a phenomenon viewership spectacle. The only stain for this pretty picture as we went through the EWC schedule were the lingering accusations of ‘sportswashing‘, a concept in which a nation uses sporting events to improve its international reputation.
While we chose not to get into the politics of it all, it’s a notion on everyone’s mind, and was highly debated before, during and after the event.
EWC Viewership, not bad, not great
Viewership is one of the more reliable means of measuring the reception of a tournament. Considering the fact that the tournaments were hosted in a media complex with a small live audience, the online viewership needed to compensate for this.
On the whole, the Esports World Cup recorded the fourth-highest viewership of any esports series in 2024 according to Esports Charts. However, considering the fact that multiple esports were involved over months, it’s not a valid statistic.
Instead, let’s take a closer look at the top five EWC tournaments based on peak viewership, comparing them to the all-time viewership record of the esport:
| EWC Tournament | EWC Peak Viewership | Esport Peak Viewership |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile Legends: Bang Bang | 2,382,990 | 5,067,107 (M5 World Championship) |
| League of Legends | 1,123,619 | 6,402,760 (2023 Worlds) |
| Counter-Strike 2 | 756,764 | 2,748,434 (PGL Major Stockholm 2021) |
| PUBG Mobile | 566,118 | 3,801,998 (PMGC Season 0) |
| Honor of Kings | 481,212 | 481,212 (EWC) |
Here are a few key takeaways:
- Mobile Legends – EWC’s best tournament managed to become the fourth most MLBB tournament of all-time
- Riyadh Masters 2024– 29% peak viewership drop from 2023
- League of Legends EWC – 20th most watched tournament of all-time for LoL
- Honor of Kings at the EWC – no statistics available from the Chinese region
Let’s Fix the Viewership
There are a few factors to consider as to why EWC viewership suffered. Here are a few common trends which resulted in the disappointing statistics:
- Short runtimes – certain tournaments, such as CS2 EWC only spanned four days. This is way to short to build hype and to retain viewers compared to the long Starcraft Majors fans are used to.
- Time zone issues – like any other esport, the venue did influence viewership with all tournaments set in the Riyadh time zone. Esports with European interest such as Dota, struggled with viewership here.
- Dull venue – yes, the production was great and the trophies were cool together with the general media around the tournament. However, a lack of a live crowd made the tournaments feel insignificant.
- Merging into the calendar – Mobile Legends succeeded so well because the EWC merged with the competitive calendar as the MLBB Mid-Season Cup. Hence, the hype made sense, teams qualified instead of earning invites and the viewership was there. Meanwhile, CoD EWC took place in the offseason.
- Multiple streams – at one point, four simultaneous esports tournaments were taking place, which may have made it challenging for viewers to find the stream.
Prize Pools and Team Falcons
The prize pool remained the best part of EWC for all parties, including esports organizations and players. While the community worries about the ‘esports winter’ and whether or not it’s over yet, EWC’s huge prize pool was a huge financial boost to competing teams who could always use the cash.
In this regard, we’re happy for all the teams and players that earned pieces of the $60 million prize pool. However, we’re not too thrilled by the EWC Club Championship which featured a $20 million prize pool.
Specifically, Falcons winning the EWC Club Championship by a landslide doesn’t sit well with us. Winning it weeks ahead of the conclusion of the tournament, this Saudi-based organization created a monopoly of talent, signing the best esports players for multiple EWC tournaments weeks before the festival.
In some cases, this sucked the excitement out of the competition, as long-standing organizations like Team Liquid had no chance of winning.
While they deserve to win, we’d like to see changes to the regulations either limiting the number of rosters esports organizations can field, or limiting how soon before the event an organization can pick up a roster to compete in the event.
Our EWC 2025 Wishlist
With that all being said, we’d like to draw up our EWC 2025 wishlist to help improve the future iteration of the tournament in every aspect:
- Calendar Integration – hosting qualifiers or closley integrating each sport in their respective esports calendar will help generate more hype and give the tournament more legitimacy
- Venues – beyond the production, a larger crowd would go a long way for these tournaments, this is not something you can force, but working toward attracting a live audience is key.
- Scheduling – for 21 tournaments, perhaps two months are enough, but longer tournaments (not four days) and a more flexible scheduling is required
- Esports that are on the up and up VALORANT or Deadlock need to be included.
On the whole, we can’t wait to see how the Esports World Cup steps things up next year.
