The 2025 Esports World Cup has already produced an exciting display of competitive gaming on a variety of platforms and genres. This global tournament series, which spans four intense weeks, has attracted millions of viewers worldwide and broken previous records for audience engagement.
Now that half of the series is over, let’s examine the most significant events, viewer patterns, and implications for competitive esport going forward.
Week-by-Week Spotlight
- Week 1: With 37% of all EWC watch time going to Dota 2 and Valorant, these two games dominated viewership.
- Week 2: Prior to mobile esports taking over, with Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and PUBG Mobile leading the way, the focus shifted to League of Legends.
- EWC 2025’s watch time has consistently increased, indicating stronger engagement across events, in contrast to 2024, where audience interest peaked in the first week before gradually declining.
Key Viewership Records & Surprises
- The MLBB Mid Season Cup 2025 was the most watched tournament in EWC history, with a peak viewership of 3 million.
- In comparison to Valorant Masters Toronto 2025, EWC Valorant 2025 did not perform as well.
- The ALGS 2025 Midseason Playoffs attracted 17% more viewers than the Open.
- Records for franchise esports were broken with the release of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.
- Free Fire became the most popular mobile battle royale of 2025 thus far, with a 17.9% YoY increase in viewership.
- The MLBB Women’s Invitational 2025 became the second most watched women’s esports tournament ever with a peak viewership of 467.9K, a 76% YoY increase.
- Peak viewership for the Dota 2 EWC event was 429.5K, up 2.4% from 2024.
- The 2025 Honor of Kings World Cup attracted 653.3K concurrent viewers, setting a record outside of China.
- At its peak, Call of Duty had 268.9K viewers, which was its second-best 2025 performance.
- StarCraft II had its highest viewership since 2021 with 79.9K.
- The most-watched PUBG Mobile event in four years, the PUBG Mobile World Cup 2025, broke several language-specific records with 1.38 million viewers.
- At its peak in 2025, Overwatch 2 had 177K live viewers.
- Chess had the highest chess esports viewership of the year when it debuted in the EWC, reaching a peak of 259.4K.
Comprehensive Reports You Might Find Useful:
- Five important factors that affect EWC Valorant’s viewership compared to Masters Toronto
- Women’s esport is boosted by the MLBB Women’s Invitational 2025.
- OpTic’s analysis of the EWC 2025 Call of Duty victory
- The 2025 PUBG Mobile World Cup breaks a four-year record.
- EWC 2025 debut boosts chess esports
Looking Ahead: EWC 2025’s Next Steps
MOBAs and mobile esports are leading in total watch hours with just a few events left. Rankings could still be shifted by the Counter-Strike tournament in late August, which might break even more viewership records.
By all measures thus far, EWC 2025 is establishing a new benchmark for esports festivals by combining well-known esports giants with up-and-coming competitive titles while also expanding its audience.
