Great games, amazing fans and an incredible atmosphere - the ESL Pro League Season 7 Finals in Dallas. After a week full of gripping esports, the six day long competition concluded with the Danes from Astralis claiming the coveted trophy in a 3-1 win over the North American Team Liquid, despite their home-court advantage. On top of taking home $250,000, Astralis are also catching up to SK Gaming and FaZe by secured their second Intel® Grand Slam trophy and thereby getting closed to bagging the $1 million bonus prize purse.
On top of the impressive performances, the ESL Pro League also expanded its range by bolstering its lineup with the best teams from South America and the Asia-Pacific region.
“We are very happy to have brought another Pro League Season Final to Dallas, which is well known as the home of competitive Counter-Strike,” said Ulrich Schulze, Senior Vice President of Product at ESL. “The geographical expansion did not only gave new teams a chance to participate in the competition but also fostered the growth of our our viewership in the Asia-Pacific region. We are looking forward to what the next Pro League season brings.”
Asia’s increased interest in CS:GO Pro League is reflected in its viewership numbers. Overall, Season 7 recorded a growth of 10,2% in concurrent online viewers compared to previous season, peaking at 691,000, thanks in large part due to growth in China and South East Asia. The move to Facebook saw a significant increase in unique viewer count. Given the nature of the platform, a lot of new fans checked out the live streams when browsing through their timeline. Overall we saw some movement in viewership from the English and Portuguese language streams to the wide variety of local language streams for Pro League.
This resulted in 42,4% more views than Season 6 and over 118 million video views in total. Overall video consumption came in at 18 million hours of content, coming from 44 live streams in 22 languages across seven digital platforms including Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, Mixer, Znipe, Caffeine and Huomao.
And even more CS:GO looms on the horizon. The CS:GO Pro League will return on October 2, 2018 for Season 8 as the best teams will compete for a period of five weeks for their share of another US $1 million prize pool. All matches will be streamed exclusively via Facebook in English and Portuguese every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. To stay up to date on all information about the upcoming season, visit the official CS:GO Pro League website and follow ESL CS on Twitter and Facebook.
