The opening weekend of the Modern Warfare 2 Call of Duty League season saw the fourth-highest viewership mark in CDL history, according to Esports Charts.
When the Call of Duty World League was franchised to the CDL in 2019, the league’s streaming platform moved exclusively to YouTube. This was alongside YouTube’s push to bring streaming services to the website. For the last three years, the CDL has operated solely on YouTube and the viewership has suffered greatly because of it. Outside of matches played by OpTic Gaming or at Champs, viewers simply weren’t tuning in to watch. But at the start of the MW2 season, the CDL revealed that it’s returning to streaming exclusively on Twitch.
The first few matches this past weekend alone had over 100,000 viewers, with the highest-view match topping off at 192,943, according to Esports Charts. This peak viewership makes it the fourth-highest viewership that the league has seen in the last few years. It is only outclassed by the last three Championships, which gathered between 238,00 and 331,000 viewers. Once again, OpTic Texas proved to be the most interesting team with their first match against the Minnesota RØKKR hitting 170,766 views and their second match against the Florida Mutineers taking the record at 192,943.
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What makes these numbers so impressive is the fact that the matches themselves were low stakes. The online matches were only qualifiers for the upcoming first Major, which will take place on LAN in Raleigh, North Carolina. Meanwhile, the other matches were the grand finals of their respective titles with millions of dollars on the line.
This shows that Twitch really does have a massive impact on the viewership for Call of Duty, especially when the games can be accessed much easier on the platform.
