The highly-popular World Series of Warzone returned this year in Warzone 2 with a whopping $1.2M prize pool. It didn’t match up to previous editions in terms of viewership, but it was a good start to the newly added Ranked Play mode that came with the Season 3 Reloaded patch.
Stage 1 of the event has ended, with the Regional Finals seeing the top 25 trios from North America and Europe sealing their berths in the Regional Finals of Stage 2. The top 15 from each region, alongside five teams from each Last Chance Qualifier and ten more sides from the seven smaller regions, will battle it out for a whopping $600K in the Global Final in September.
The World Series of Warzone 2023 Stage 1 EU Final hit 120K Peak Viewers during Round 4 of the action on June 8. It also recorded 523K Hours Watched and 104K Average Viewers over an airtime of five hours, meaning it failed to match up to the numbers set at the World Series of Warzone 2022 EU Finals.
Among streamers, it was the popular Call of Duty Warzone content creator and member of Team Quadrant, fifakillvizualz, who was the most popular and watched individual channel.
Following him was Jukeyz, the Call of Duty esports player considered one of the best in the world who also won the WSOW Season 1 EU Trios two years back, as the third most popular channel. Swagg, the FaZe Clan CoD content creator, was the third most watched handle in this region.
When looking at other metrics, English was the most preferred language, as is the case throughout CoD tournaments, taking up more than 57% of the viewership pie. Moving to platforms, Twitch, too, reigned supreme, notching above 92.5% of the overall charts, continuing its dominance of a discipline that it has come to become synonymous with.
Moving to the other region, the World Series of Warzone 2023 Stage 1 NA Final did 139K Peak Viewers towards the end of the competition. It also registered 625K Hours Watched and 112K Average Viewers over six hours of airtime, which was not as much as the World Series of Warzone 2022 NA Finals.
The official COD handle was once again top on both metrics here, but it was Swagg who ended up as the second most watched and third most popular handle among NA audiences, and for good reason. As a member of Nuke Squad, FaZe Clan’s video creation team, he has been producing top-drawer content on Call of Duty competitions for a while, and that has helped him accrue a dedicated fanbase.
The second-most popular and third-most watched account was Aydan, the New York Subliners content creator known for his Warzone 2 videos. Apart from being the first player to earn $200K & $300K in Warzone, he recently created a world record of 61 kills in DUO quads with no Jailbreak on Warzone 2.
Coming to the languages, English had an ever higher share here, accumulating more than 81% of the total share. Twitch had a slightly lesser share here, with Facebook accruing for the portion the purple platform lost out on compared to Europe.
When looking at the last two editions of these regional competitions, both saw sharp falls in 2023. The EU region saw an almost 74% dip in watch hours this year, while the peak concurrent viewership stats decreased by 92.7% in almost the same amount of airtime.
Similarly, NA dropped by 107% in HW and 110% in PV in 2023, with the airtime being the same for both competitions. These declines happened despite the number of channels covering the action being almost the same (NA) or much more (EU) across the respective regions.
NA seriously missed the presence of YouTube superstar TimTheTatman and Twitch megastar Scump this time around, as they were in the top three for most popular and watched channels in 2022. EU, meanwhile, was poorer in the absence of French streamer & YouTuber chowh1, who himself has won this event before, topping the podium at the World Series of Warzone Season 1 EU SoloYolo in 2021.
With the in-game open for Stage 2 beginning at the end of this month, CoD fans have a lot of action to look forward to before the ultimate showdown happens at the WSOW Global Final. It will include Trios and Solos action from the best players from around the world.
