The recently concluded Call of Duty League 2024 Stage 1 Major saw positive numbers across the board, with the tournament being the most-watched Stage 1 Major to date.
A total of just over 245,000 viewers tuned into the Major, making it the eighth most-watched Call of Duty League event ever, according to esports data platform Esports Charts.
The Stage 1 Major is the large-scale tournament of the Call of Duty League season. The tournament gathers the best CDL teams, with this the first edition taking place at the MGM Music Hall in Boston. The Stage 1 Major was organised jointly by the CDL franchise Boston Breach and the game’s developers Activision Blizzard.
The tournament saw Toronto Ultra, owned by OverActive Media, win the grand finals after beating Atlanta FaZe. Interestingly, FaZe was the most-watched team of the tournament with 1.3m total hours watched. Meanwhile, the winners placed fourth in this metric with just under 850,000 hours watched on their matches.
An average of 123,000 viewers followed the Call of Duty League Stage 1 Major, and the tournament gathered just under 4m hours watched across its 32 hours of air time. This makes it the most-watched Stage 1 Major tournament in the Call of Duty League history. Compared to the 2023 edition, this year’s event had around 100,000 more peak viewers and around 10,000 more average viewers.
The viewership increase makes the 2024 Stage 1 Major a better-performing tournament than the 2023 Stage 5 Major and the Call of Duty World League Championship 2019, as well as most ‘stage’ events in the Call of Duty League calendar. The only Majors with more viewers were the 2023 Stage 2,3 and 4 Majors.
The viewership numbers are even more promising when taking into account that the Call of Duty League (CDL) will be broadcast exclusively on YouTube for the 2024 season, thus eliminating Twitch viewership.
The next Call of Duty Major is to take place during the esports and gaming festival GAMERGY in March 2024 and will be hosted by the Florida-based organisation Miami Heretics.
