The Ukrainian esports segment continues to grow at a record pace. Over the year, the volume of viewings of Ukrainian-language broadcasts increased by 30,5%, and the Ukrainian language has already taken fourth place in the world in terms of peak viewership at Counter-Strike tournaments.
The Ukrainian esports segment continues to grow at a record pace. Over the year, the volume of viewings of Ukrainian-language broadcasts increased by 30,5%, and the Ukrainian language has already taken fourth place in the world in terms of peak viewership at Counter-Strike tournaments.
According to Esports Charts, in 2025, viewers spent over 25.16 million hours watching Ukrainian-language broadcasts. This is the highest result in the entire history of observations. For comparison, in 2024 this figure was 19.1 million hours. The duration of broadcasts also increased by 19% — to 11.3 thousand hours.
The main drivers of growth were the Counter-Strike majors — BLAST.tv Austin Major and StarLadder Budapest Major 2025, which each gained over 2.2 million hours of viewing. The latter tournament set a historical record for the Ukrainian segment in terms of peak audience — 116.2 thousand viewers at the same time. This is the second result in the entire history of Ukrainian-language esports after the finals of PGL Major Copenhagen 2024.
Natus Vincere traditionally garnered the lion’s share of Ukrainian viewership. In 2025, matches of various NAVI squads were watched for over 133 million hours, of which 45% fell on Counter-Strike 2. At the same time, the most popular match of the year was the semi-final of the StarLadder Major between NAVI and FaZe Clan.
Among teams with more than half of their players being Ukrainian, B8 Esports, which debuted at two majors and garnered 12.95 million hours of viewing across all languages, was the leader. NAVI came in second, and NAVI Junior came in third.
Most Ukrainian viewers watched the broadcasts through the Maincast studio, which dominates Twitch and YouTube. Streamers Lebiga, Ghostik, and Leniniw also made it to the top. Interestingly, the new studio «Kholodtsi», despite its short period of activity, entered the top ten most popular Ukrainian-language channels.
Ukrainian has almost caught up with Polish and German in terms of viewership, and is firmly establishing itself among the leading languages of global esports. This is yet another confirmation that the Ukrainian-speaking audience is becoming an important player on the global stage.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how the Ukrainian analytical company Esports Charts analyzed Ukrainian-language esports broadcasts for the first half of 2025 and reported that in the first half of 2025, users watched a total of over 13.1 million hours of streams.
