The Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) Mid Season Cup 2024 has seen a decrease in viewership from its 2023 counterpart, making it the lowest-viewed mid-season international event since 2021.
The annual event, which took place in the Boulevard Riyadh City, AMAZON Arena, had a peak viewership of 2.38m, according to esports data platform Esports Charts.
This year’s peak viewership decreased by over 1m compared to last year’s MLBB Southeast Asia Cup 2023, the event’s previous name before its rebranding earlier in the year. The 2023 edition recorded a peak viewership of 3.65m and 659,399 average viewers. The latter figure is over 250,000 more than this year’s average viewership (406,643).
This season’s MLBB Mid Season Cup was held at the Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and featured the esports title’s largest-ever prize pool at $3m (~£2.36m). The Esports World Cup has drawn criticism largely in relation to its connection to the Saudi Arabian government and the country’s human rights record.
The event was won by Selangor Red Giants (SRG), the esports division of Malaysian football team Selangor Football Club, which took down the Philippines-based esports organisation Falcons AP.Bren in the Grand Final, the most viewed match of the event. As well as being crowned champions, SRG also had the highest average viewership per team with 696,000.
Even though Indonesian teams this year did not perform well in the event, Indonesian language streams had the highest peak viewership of the event with 833,579. The other high viewership streams were broadcast in Tagalog (622,697), Bahasa Malaysia (467,282), English (266,496) and Khmer (96,777). Given these statistics, the decrease in viewership could be attributed to the fact that an Indonesian team failed to make it to the top eight. Both 2022 and 2023 featured an Indonesian team in the finals.
YouTube continued to dominate in terms of streaming services with a peak viewership of over 1.2m. Its only real competitor for this event, TikTok Live, had a peak of just over 800,000. The three other streaming services with broadcasts of this event were Bigo Live (20,274), Twitch (12,099) and Kick (935).
Overall, the MLBB Mid Season Cup 2024 was the title’s 10th-highest-viewed esports event ever.
