IEM Katowice 2025 has kicked off, featuring the latest format introduced by Valve and an all-female CS2 team whose participation in the tournament has drawn a ton of attention, bringing the legendary event to its biggest play-in viewership since the pre-COVID days.
These new and fresh introductions to the Counter-Strike tournament formula clearly have found a liking among audiences, as the event opened to around 400,000 peak concurrent viewers who tuned in to watch FURIA Esports duke it out with the all-female Imperial Valkyries, according to Esports Charts. In hours watched, Esports Charts shows that IEM Katowice 2025 saw a 57-percent increase over last year’s event, indicating that female rosters are real attention-grabbers for the CS public, as are expansions and changes to the game’s tournament format.
Even at peak viewership, IEM Katowice 2025 saw a 29 percent increase over last year, with over 412,000 fans tuning in to watch the showdown. The broadcast also lasted much longer, as play-in matches were changed into best-of-threes rather than best-of-ones, increasing the drama, length, and interest of the matches that didn’t end too quickly. If these numbers are anything to go by, we can already guess that upcoming Majors will also see a significant uptick in viewership, especially with the expanded 32-team format that is bound to give us a lot more matches to watch than previous iterations have.
IEM Katowice 2025 is currently on its third day, and while second-day viewership has dwindled in some parts of the world, the event’s English-speaking viewers are still putting up healthy numbers, indicating that the tournament will retain most of its high viewership over the course of its duration. It began on Jan. 29 and will run until Feb. 9, with $1 million USD prize pool.
Published: Jan 31, 2025 7:59 PM UTC