Rainbow Six Siege (R6 Siege)’s Six Invitational 2024 has become the most viewed R6 Siege esports event ever after recording a peak viewership of 521,349.
The annual season-ending event, which took place in São Paulo, Brazil, saw an average viewership of 109,091 across 119 hours of airtime, per viewership data platform Esports Charts.
The figure marks a turning point for for the game’s esports scene following concerns over the title’s esports popularity. Peak viewership numbers had declined for each consecutive Six Invitational since 2018.
Previously, the most viewed Six Invitational was in 2018 with a peak viewership of 316,096 which was followed closely by Six Invitational 2019 (315,240). This year’s figure marks a more than doubling of the Six Invitational 2023’s peak viewership of 232,000.
The most recent Major, the BLAST R6 Major Atlanta 2023, was the least popular Major in Rainbow Six’s history recording under 80,000 peak viewers.
The Six Invitational, which concluded on February 25, is the culmination of the Rainbow Six Siege esports season. Interestingly, this year’s Six Invitational had a $3m (~£2.37m) prize pool, six times the prize pool of the Six Invitational 2018.
The event was won by Brazilian organisation W7M Esports, the winner of the most recent Major, triumphing over FaZe Clan in the Grand Final and securing $1m from the $3m prize pool in front of its home crowd. Both W7M Esports and FaZe Clan currently field Brazilian rosters in R6 Siege.
W7M was also the most popular esports organisation in attendance when it came to hours watched, securing 5m hours watched, 1.4m more hours than runner up FaZe Clan.
Despite the event being held in Brazil and won by a Brazilian team, the majority of the viewership came from English speaking streams with a peak of over 375,000 compared to Portuguese (118,483). Most of the viewers also came from Twitch (459,619 peak) as opposed to YouTube (58,942 peak).
The Six Invitational 2024 marks the first year that BLAST has operated Rainbow Six Siege’s esports circuit, and the first time a Rainbow Six LAN event had been held in Brazil since 2018. BLAST struck a multi-year deal with Ubisoft to operate R6 Siege’s esports scene in December 2022.
Ahead of the Grand Final, BLAST and Ubisoft announced event locations for the game’s 2024 and 2025 esports seasons.
