March 18 The ESL Pro League has broken more viewership records
The new season of the ESL Pro League started up earlier this week with some incredible Counter-Strike: Global Offensive matchups featuring some of the world’s greatest teams, and like everything else at the moment, it’s breaking viewership records.
The league, which is being played online at the moment due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, begun on Monday (March 16) on Twitch. ESL announced that the league would be split into a European and North American division with three groups and one group respectively to help with concerns over ping. Heroic was also replaced by BIG due to a roster change, and Renegades, who refused to travel, was replaced by Swole Patrol.
Yet, despite all of the changes, it seems ESL Pro League has got off to a flying start. All of the league’s streams pulled in over 146,000 concurrent viewers, which is an increase of 27% from previous years. It also had the highest ever English concurrent viewers on Twitch in the league’s history.
According to Twitch Metrics, the English Twitch stream had an average of 42,034 viewers for the Pro League Season 11 Group A stream, but a peak of 75,586. The new record is set as Twitch records new viewership figures itself – something that is, in part, touted to be the effect of many self isolation and quarantine policies in place across the world.
Season 11 of the new #ESLProLeague has already broken records on its first day!
✅ Over 146k (+27%) concurrent viewers! Thank you to all fans tuning in!
✅ Highest ever English concurrents on Twitch for past seasons!The action continues very soon!
📺 https://t.co/y32dC0F1EI pic.twitter.com/RfQZhibWJD— ESL Counter-Strike (@ESLCS) March 17, 2020
On the second day, more than 1.4 million hours of the EPL streams were watched, making it the single most watched broadcast day of the league’s history. The second day also topped the record for concurrent viewers at 268,000, making it an 83% increase from Monday’s matches.
The EPL kicks off again later today when Astralis takes on GODSENT, followed by Vitality vs ENCE. The action starts at 10AM PT (2PM ET / 5PM GMT).
