The MLBB Mid Season Cup 2025 was concluded on August 2 where Team Liquid PH won the championship and took home the largest share of the $3 million (~£2.26m) prize pool.
The MSC 2025, now in its second year as part of the Esports World Cup (EWC) in Riyadh, racked up a whopping 3.1 million peak viewers, an increase of nearly 700k compared to 2024.
With the conclusion of the tournament, statistics and information from the event reveal the reasons this tournament became the 3rd most popular esports tournament in 2025.
A Closer Look at the MLBB Mid Season Cup
The Southeast Asia Cup was replaced by the MLBB Mid Season Cup. It was introduced in 2024 and became the first major international in-season event on the calendar. The global Esports World Cup changed its format and prize money jumped from $300,000 to $3 million in a year (10 times increase in prize money).
MLBB was already pretty popular in SEA but it was made a lot more known in the West through the EWC. Team Liquid, Fnatic, Team Vitality and other western esports organisations had the motivation of collecting EWC points and escalating their positioning when entering mobile esports.
As per Esports Charts data, the 2024 maiden edition of MSC in Riyadh had an average viewership of 406638 with more than 29 million hours-watched during the 72 hours of live-stream. The AP.Bren vs SRG.OG (Selangor Red Giants OG Esports) Grand Final alone peaked at nearly 2.4 million total viewers.
MSC 2025 has similar runtime of 84 hours as its predecessor. But the viewership has more than doubled, has above 50 million hours watched. Plus it has around 600k average viewers. Remarkably, the tournament amassed over 2 million peak viewers in four of its most-watched games.
Surprisingly, the most-watched game wasn’t the Final. The battle between RRQ.H and SRG.OG in the Knockout Stage attracted the most viewers. The fourth-most-popular match in the tournament was the Grand Final between Team Liquid PH and SRG.OG with Just under 2.3 million peak viewers.
The lack of favourite teams like RRQ and ONIC from the final match could explain this unusual turn of events. A fight between RRQ and SRG.OG makes it 2-3, one of the most competitive games of this tournament. While the final is a 4-1 win where Team Liquid is the winner.
SRG.OG earned the highest total of watch hours by team with a whopping 17.1 million hours. ONIC and ONIC Philippines ranked third and fourth, clocking in at 13.2 million hours and 13.1 million hours, respectively. Team Liquid PH gathered an impressive 12.6 million hours viewed, while RRQ capped off the list at 7.8 million hours viewed.
The average views per team comparator ranked RRQ at the top with 1.3 million views, followed by Team Liquid PH and SRG.OG both with 1.2 million views, followed by ONIC (1.1 million) and ONIC PH (993,100).
Broadcast Language and Platform Performance
Since MLBB is very popular in Southeast Asia, it’s not surprising that the Indonesian-language streams took the top spot with 1.97 million peak viewers.
Other popular languages included:
- Bahasa Malaysia: 643,900.
- Tagalog: 605,542.
- English: 332,789.
Western streaming platforms had lesser interaction, the most popular, Twitch having only 17,268 peak viewers while, YouTube and TikTok Live had 1.7 million and 1.3 million peak viewers, respectively.
Comparing MSC 2025 to Other Esports Events
Due to its record-breaking numbers, MSC 2025 becomes the ninth most popular Mobile Legends tournament of all time, just behind M2 World Championship (3.083 million peak viewers).
The record in MLBB still belongs to the M5 World Championship which peaked at 5.1 million viewers in 2023.
Meanwhile, the out of all the esports, the highest peak viewer ship is the 2024 League of Legends World Championship with just under 7 million viewers. M5 is fifth in the overall standings and MSC 2025 is eighteenth in the combined esports standings.
Despite its popularity, the MSC 2025 was not the most-watched mid-season MLBB tourney. Still, the 2023 Southeast Asia Cup holds that title, where the peak viewership reached almost 3.7 million during the final of ONIC against Blacklist International. ONIC garnered 20.3 million hours watched while Blacklist recorded 16.7 million. These two organisations led in total hours watched.
What Drove MSC 2025’s Record Growth?
Though the number of teams and prize pool remained unchanged between 2024 and 2025 editions of the Franchisees, one of the major reasons for the growth this year was the change in tournament format.
Earlier, a round robin structure was observed for Wildcard and Group Stages while only Knockout Stage utilized a single-elimination bracket.
In 2025, however, the pattern was restructured in order that each stage had either single- or double-elimination brackets, substantially increasing the intensity and stakes of every match.
With ONIC not advancing from the Group Stage of MSC 2024, this could also explain the boost in views. Fans of ONIC are known to be very loyal and this team featured in three out of five most-watched matches of the year.
It’s likely that their missing presence in the latter part of MSC 2024 caused the decline in peak viewership till the final. On the other hand, this year’s tournament had several high-profile matches between strong teams with each stage of the tournament.