Last weekend, YouTube hosted one of the most significant streaming events of the fall called World's Greatest Gamer, featuring a prize pool of $100,000. Teaming up with content maker Ludwig and his associated agency Offbrand, the hosting brought together some of the best gamers on the planet from various games and clashed them against each other in not-that-familiar titles to them.
Throughout August, the participants competed in different games and determined the strongest who would go to Los Angeles for two-day face-to-face battles. The finals brought together the top 20 gamers, including both content creators and esports athletes, including the likes of Tyson TenZ Ngo, Jesse "JerAx" Vainikka, Brandon Aceu Winn and many more.
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James VoiD Makekau-Tyson, a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate player from Hawaii, became the champion of the competition in an incredibly beautiful fashion. He almost dropped out of the event at the end of the first day and made an incredible comeback on the second day when he defeated pro FPS player (Apex Legends) Aceu in a CS:GO 1v1 duel, and also dominated in many other titles, including Lego 2k Drive, Tetris and Street Fighter 6.
The finals of the competition were held on September 2-3 and it successfully passed the mark of a million hours of watch time (the final result is 1.15 million Hours Watched) in 17 hours 30 min of airtime. Spectators showed the greatest activity on the first day of the competition when the viewership peak was reached: over 112,000 people watched the event at the same time.
The main broadcast of the event took place on the Ludwig channel, a partner of YouTube Gaming, and, as expected, it turned out to be the most popular of all the broadcasts presented. On average, the channel's audience was around 40,000 people, and over 52,000 viewers were watching it at peak (the stream is in the top 10 Ludwig’s YouTube broadcasts of all time).
Despite the fact that YouTube was the organizer of the event, the participants (who mostly stream on Twitch) could broadcast on third-party platforms. Twitch creators, especially TenZ, erobb221, and supertf, made a significant contribution to the final viewership figures of the tournament: this trio managed to overcome the bar of 10,000 concurrent viewers at peak.
Statistics for the article are provided by Esports Charts. One of the main advantages of the Esports Charts PRO subscription is a database of hundreds of esports and streamer events, which opens up additional opportunities for analytics and making on-point business decisions.
In terms of audience, YouTube World's Greatest Gamer is definitely one of the most successful offline events of the year in North America. The unique format, praises from the community, and significant numbers on streaming platforms definitely give reason to believe that this could just be the start of a hugely successful streaming series.
