The massive competition had a big Valve-funded prize pool and was really popular

Aug 21, 2014 08:34 GMT  ·  By

Last week saw gamers flock to Cologne, Germany, for the Gamescom 2014 event, but attendants were also able to admire the ESL One Cologne Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament, the second major competition of the year for Valve's shooter.

CS:GO has been slowly but surely gaining popularity in the last year or so, and ever since last winter, Valve has started funding major tournaments with money earned from the community, which can buy keys and cases that earn them in-game weapon skins.

ESL One Cologne was the third such tournament in the history of the game and the second of the year, after EMS One Katowice, which took place this spring in Poland and saw local team Virtus Pro earn the top spot.

The competition ended on Sunday and awarded fan-favorite team Ninjas in Pyjamas the winner, taking home $100,000 (around €75,000). The popular team had a rocky road towards the conclusion of the event and this was the third time it made its way towards the finals, after reaching them both at Dreamhack Winter 2013 and at EMS One Katowice.

Both times it was defeated, but this time around it managed to gain the upper hand over Fnatic, the Dreamhack Winter 2013 winner.

What's more, the numbers have been crunched and it seems that hundreds of thousands of fans tuned into the event. Overall figures peaked at 409,368 concurrent viewers during the final, with 343,638 of them watching it through the Twitch website. The rest of them watched through the actual game itself, as it gained special spectating and caster support recently, just in time for the major competition.

"It’s amazing to see the growth of Counter Strike: Global Offensive in the eSports community. Just five months after ESL One Katowice, we see ESL One Cologne 2014 break our previous record by an amazing 161%," says Ulrich Schulze, managing director Pro Gaming at ESL.

"We had over ten million sessions and were just shy of three million unique viewers for ESL One Cologne 2014. It’s absolutely amazing to see and we’re all very excited to get back to work and see where we can take Counter-Strike: Global Offensive next."

Based on previous strategies, you can expect November's Dreamhack Winter to be the next Valve-funded major tournament for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Until then, the company can resume updating the game without worrying about turning upcoming competitions on their heads.

As of right now, it's unclear what Valve plans for its quite popular game.