The Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) Mid Season Cup 2025 event, which happened on August 2, saw Team Liquid PH emerge victorious, securing the biggest share of a whopping $3m prize pool. The second tournament of Esports World Cup in Riyadh set a new record with almost 3.1 million peak viewers, about 700,000 more than last year’s tournament.
With the hype subsiding, let’s take a look at the viewership numbers that made MSC 2025 the 3rd most-watched esports tournament of 2025 so far.
The Evolution of the MLBB Mid Season Cup
The MLBB Mid Season Cup was introduced in 2024 to replace the Southeast Asia Cup. The Mid Season Cup is the top international midseason tournament in the Mobile Legends competitive calendar. Thanks to integration into the Esports World Cup (EWC), the event saw its prize pool balloon from $300,000 in 2023 to a significant $3 million in later years.
Gaming culture in Southeast Asia has long been mobile esports focused. As such, MLBB’s partnership with EWC, a global multi-title competition, gets attention from the West and industry stakeholders. Major Western organisations such as Team Liquid, Fnatic and Team Vitality have started to expand into mobile titles in order to acquire EWC Points and improve their overall event position.
Breaking Down the 2025 Viewership Statistics
The 2025 MSC edition made waves with its statistics, all thanks to Esports Charts, during its 84-hour duration.
- People watched over 50 million hours.
- Nearly 600,000 average viewers.
- Peak number of viewers was 3.1 million
- More than two million people watched the top four international cricket matches.
The Knockout Stage series between RRQ.H and SRG.OG actually had the highest viewership, not the Grand Final. SRG.OG vs Team Liquid PH was the fourth most popular event with a peak of 2.3 million viewers. The strange distribution could be caused by the popularity of teams like RRQ and ONIC that did not reach the final game.
The series between RRQ and SRG.OG was very close with a nail biting score of 3-2 while the Grand Final saw Team Liquid win quite easily with a score of 4-1.
Team Popularity and Regional Impact
The top teams for most accumulated watch hours on esports broadcasts on YouTube in the Philippines were, in order, SRG.OG with 17.1 million hours, ONIC with 13.2 million, and ONIC Philippines with 13.1 million. The fifth position was taken up by Team Liquid PH (12.6 million) and RRQ (7.8 million).
According to average viewership, RRQ tops the list with 1.3 million viewers and followed closely by Team Liquid PH and SRG.OG (both 1.2 million), ONIC (1.1 million), and ONIC PH (993,100).
Since MLBB is really popular in Southeast Asia, the Indonesian broadcasts had the biggest viewership with 1.97 million peak views. English streams were ranked fourth most viewed with 332,789 a behind Tagalog with 605,542 and Bahasa Malaysia 643,900.
Platform choices further showcased the continental split as YouTube (1.7 million peak viewers) and TikTok Live (1.3 million) bagged the lion’s share of viewership, while Twitch, which has a big following in the West, saw just 17,268 peak viewers.
MSC 2025 in the Esports Landscape
With those amazing numbers, it places MSC 2025 as the ninth most popular MLBB tournament in history – behind M2 World Championship (3.083 million peak viewers). The all time high viewership for mobile legends has been the M5 championship, which peak viewership was almost 5.1 million in 2023. The other Esports tournament, the 2024 League of Legends World Championship, is leading them with almost 7 million peak viewership, M5 ranked 5th and MSC 2025 was 18th overall.
Surprisingly, MSC 2025 probably did not overshadow the 2023 Southeast Asia Cup, the championship with the highest viewership amongst mid-season MLBB events, making for a Grand Final with almost 3.7 million viewers. Both ONIC and Blacklist International – the competing teams in this match-up – are known for their large following, with 20.3 million watch hours and 16.7 million watch hours respectively.
Factors Behind MSC 2025’s Success
MSC 2025 is getting more popular than 2024 edition despite having the same number of teams and similarly prize pools.The tournament format for the entirety of the event was changed from a combination of round-robin-style and elimination brackets to solely single or double elimination brackets. Thus, the stakes were raised in each and every match.
ONIC’s removal during the Group Stage of MSC 20204 probably affected the viewership that year. As a team with a large fanbase following MSCs and Southeast Asia Cups, ONIC participated in three out of five most-watched matches during MSC 2024, while viewership dipped until the Grand Final after their exit.