The Call of Duty League 2025 season officially kicked off on Friday, December 6, 2024, and absolutely smashed its peak 2024 viewership with almost double the highest concurrent figure.
Black Ops 6 launched in late October to great fanfare, and was even voted Dexerto’s Game of the Year in our write-up of the best games of 2024.
Early reports suggest that this success has translated over to the competitive side of the game too, as the opening weekend of the CDL saw this huge boost in numbers.
According to Esports Charts, concurrent viewership peaked at over 204,000, as the LA Guerrillas M8 went to a Game 5, Round 11 against the Minnesota Rokkr.
This was assisted largely thanks to a co-stream from Gentle Mates co-owner and French COD legend Corentin ‘Gotaga’ Houssein, who had upwards of 70,000 viewers when that final round started.
The Gentle Mates-owned team, LAGM8, also took the second spot for peak viewership with almost 175,000 tuning in to watch their loss against Carolina Royal Ravens.
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OpTic Texas, who usually dominate the top spots, took the fourth and fifth highest peak viewership with their matches against Boston Breach and Cloud9 New York, while third was LA Thieves vs Atlanta FaZe, which almost reached 160,000.
Huge jump from 2024 opening weekend
Compared to the CDL 2024 viewership, these numbers are a huge step up. In the opening weekend last year, viewership peaked at just under 107,000 – almost half of the LAG vs Minnesota peak.
While this was clearly helped by Gotaga’s co-streams, the numbers without his viewership were still much higher than 2024, a good indication of an upward trajectory for the season. In fact, it was higher than any regular season peak last year, outside of the Major tournaments.
Of course, it’s only one weekend of matches in a long season, so this could ebb and flow a lot over the course of the year, especially as we approach the Majors and big LAN tournaments.
Regardless, it’s a positive sign for the state of the league, and one that everyone involved should be excited to see.