CDL Champs 2023 viewership peaks ahead of last year’s event with major watch time spike
Call of Duty League2023’s Call of Duty League Championship Weekend reached a peak viewership record greater than last year’s Champs event and concluded with a significant increase in overall watch time despite ending on one of the shortest Grand Finals to date.
2023’s CDL Champs has wrapped up, and it ultimately resulted in New York Subliners taking home the trophy after a dominant sweep against the Toronto Ultra. Not only did NYSL take home their very first rings, HyDra took home 2023 CDL MVP and KiSMET took out Champs MVP as well.
Another interesting fact about the Grand Finals was that it was one of the shortest ever played in CoD history, with the Best of Nine only going to five maps, and the first three being incredibly speedy wins from the Subliners.
Despite the finals being exceedingly shortlived, and the schedule being quite packed into a four-day broadcast run, 2023’s CDL Champs overtook last year’s Vanguard event in regard to peak viewership, and also recorded a considerably greater overall watch time to boot.
According to Esports Charts, the 2023 Grand Finals drew a total of 294,178 concurrent viewers at its peak, with a total of 4,419,614 hours watched in total throughout the event.
This beats last year’s Champs by quite a bit, as Vanguard’s final tournament peaked at 275,244 viewers, with overall hours watched not going above 3.3 million.
However, this is not Call of Duty’s peak as a whole. This year’s Major III Finals still holds the records, with the Lower Bracket Finals between fan favorites Atlanta FaZe and OpTic Texas soaring to 335,170 concurrent viewers.
Despite the relatively low results in the grand scheme of 2023, it still saw one of the highest Champs Grand Finals viewership since 2020’s CDL Finals which hit over 331,000 viewers.
Unfortunately, CDL Champs’ Grand Finals was not the biggest esports event of the weekend. Mobile Legends: Southeast Asia Cup blew every other competition out of the water with 3.65 million viewers at its peak.
