The Grand Final of Intel Extreme Masters Cologne 2024 between Team Vitality and Natus Vincere (NAVI) reached a peak viewership of more than 1m, becoming Counter-Strike 2’s second-highest viewed event so far this year.
The peak of 1.05m viewers that tuned into Team Vitality’s 3-1 victory is bested only by March’s PGL Major Copenhagen which peaked at 1.85m, according to data available through esport data and viewership company Esports Charts.
IEM Cologne managed an average of 278,000 viewers across the tournament, earning 25.5m hours watched over its 92 hours of airtime. The Grand Final was unsurprisingly the most viewed matchup, followed by the quarter-final between FaZe Clan and SAW which peaked at 616,000 viewers and the semi-final between MOUZ and NAVI which reached a peak of 605,000.
The final cemented IEM Cologne as the Counter-Strike tournament with the 12th highest peak viewership figure since Esports Charts’ records began in 2016. It was also the second-highest viewed IEM Cologne series, behind only the 2022 final between FaZe Clan and NAVI. While the 1m viewer peak is up significantly from IEM Cologne 2023’s peak of 727,000 viewers, this year’s average of 278,000 viewers is down from the previous iteration which saw an average of 291,000.
Counter-Strike’s viewership continues to be one of the largest and steadiest of all esports titles, with the majority of its larger tier-one events reaching viewership figures in the hundreds of thousands. Other IEM events so far this year have seen a peak of 972,000 viewers for Katowice, and a peak of 824,000 for IEM Dallas earlier this summer.
The CS2 tournament at the ongoing Esports World Cup saw a viewership peak of 757,000, remaining the event’s second-most watched title behind League of Legends which earned a maximum of 1.12m spectators.