The Free Fire World Series 2022 Bangkok has recorded a significant viewership drop compared to the game’s previous global event earlier this year.
The Free Fire World Series, which took place twice this year, garnered a peak viewership of 354,836. This is down from its 1.47m figure recorded at Free Fire World Series 2022 Sentosa in May, according to statistics from Esports Charts.
Free Fire is a competitive mobile battle royale game developed by Singapore-based Garena. Its latest World Series event took place in Bangkok, Thailand, and saw EVOS Phoenix secure first place and $500,000 (~£415,020) in prize money.
The most viewed match was the grand final between EVOS Phoenix and Keyd Stars. Overall the event secured 170,000 average viewers, which is significantly less than its previous edition’s 600,000 average viewership figure.
The numbers look even more interesting when you compare the Bangkok tournament with the Free Fire World Series 2021 Singapore, which is still the most-viewed esports event of all time. The 2021 event saw around 5.4m peak viewers, a record still not broken by any mobile, PC or console game.
Despite the Free Fire World Series debuting as a bi-annual event, this is the first time Garana has been able to deliver two global offline tournaments. This was largely due to last year’s FFWS November event being cancelled over COVID-19 concerns. As such, there is no direct comparison that can be made between this year’s series to other tournaments that have occurred at a similar time.
Nevertheless, the viewership of the tournament was not much higher than that of the most popular regional qualifier, the FFL Latinoamerica 2022 Closing, which attracted 230,000 peak viewers.
