IESF announces games for the 2023 World Esports Championship

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Image credit: IESF

The International Esports Federation (IESF) has announced the games that will be played at its upcoming World Esports Championship, set to take place in Romania in August 2023.

CS:GO, Dota 2, Tekken 7, eFootball, PUBG MOBILE and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang will be the games featured at the 15th edition of the World Esports Championship.

There have been no changes to the game lineup since the last edition that took place in Bali, Indonesia in 2022. A female CS:GO tournament, which last year was organised with the support of GIRLGAMER, is also set to return, according to IESF’s website.

The World Esports Championship is one of the longest-running esports tournaments in the world. It is notable for featuring national teams from IESF member countries, rather than esports teams or organisations.

PUBG MOBILE and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) were first introduced to the tournament last year in a move that proved to be a success for the tournament from a viewership perspective. The 2022 edition of the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang tournament was one of the most-watched events of December 2022 with more than 670,000 peak viewers.

However, the tournament generally attracts very poor viewership and has seemingly not remained popular with the general public.

The combined viewership of CS:GO, eFootball, Tekken, Dota 2 and PUBG MOBILE together recorded only just over 102,000 views in last year’s edition, according to Esports Charts data.

Tekken and CS:GO saw the worst viewership, with the fighting game seeing just over 3,000 viewers at its peak, and CS:GO peaking at around 5,700 viewers.

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’s success may be attributed to the fact that another popular tournament in its scene, the SEA Games, also features a national team-based MLBB tournament.

The most popular matchup in both the SEA Games 2022 and the IESF World Esports Championship was the final between Indonesia and the Philippines.

Even though the last year did not see very good viewership across five of its six games, the IESF President Vlad Marinescu was positive, stating that IESF is “thrilled to announce that the same six tremendously popular game titles will be featured in the upcoming championship.”

Ivan Šimić
Ivan comes from Croatia, loves weird simulator games, and is terrible at playing anything else. Spent 5 years writing about tech and esports in Croatia, and is now doing it here.