Nearly 5 million viewers tuned in to watch an all-time great Street Fighter V final at Evolution Championship Series 2017. The finals aired on ESPN2 for the second year in a row and Disney XD for the first time, garnering an estimated total viewership of 3.1 million. Twitch’s total unique viewership of 1.65 million brings the overall number to 4.75 million, the largest ever for an FGC event.

The Main Stage at the Evo 2017 Finals at Mandalay Bay. Photo by Carlton Beener.

Evo 2017’s top 8 featured an intriguing power struggle between Japan and USA, showcasing character diversity and gameplay at Street Fighter V’s highest level. Long-time Street Fighter veteran ECHO FOX|Tokido headlined the five players from Japan, including GGP|Kazunoko, first-time finalists Moke and DTN|Itabashi Zangief, and the only returning player from Evo 2016’s finals, GRPT|MOV.

America’s hopes for its first Evo Street Fighter V championship rested on the shoulders of first-time Street Fighter finalist and former Marvel champion SPLYCE|Filipino Champ, Capcom Cup 2016 champion Liquid|NuckleDu, and the most dominating player in Street Fighter V in 2017, PG|Punk.

Nine different characters were used in top 8 -- Dhalsim, Chun-Li, Guile, Rashid, Zangief, Cammy, Karin, Nash, and Akuma. The players got to show off some ingenious technology with their respective characters in the highly entertaining finals. Some of the highlights of the finals were ECHO FOX|Tokido versus SPLYCE|Filipino Champ and DTN|Itabashi Zangiefand Moke in nail-biting sets as they played for their tournament lives in the losers bracket.

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Does Disney XD allow Bayonetta in Smash btw?

It's crazy to me that Disney XD allows fighting games.

Anyways yeah, I remember Maximillian saying since like 6 months after SFV's launch that it makes a ton off events.

I just can't that the name Disney XD seriously XD

People talk all sorts of shit about SF5, but it was entertaining as hell at EVO this year. Tokido's comeback was huge.

Tokido was on a warpath.  He just destroyed everyone in his way.  His Akuma was also on a completely different level.

Kudos to SFV at Evo for achieving this. I missed out on watching this live, though, but it was fun catching up to what happened.

But...their top 8 wasn't the best thing to come out of Evo, it was the HyperX SFV x Melee post-Evo stream.
To be specific, it was the half-hour Jenga match ( Liquid | Hungrybox and Liquid | Chillindude VS FOX | Chocoblanka and FOX | Tokido ), though the second match was also hype af

tbh the FGC this year has really gotten a lot more entertaining (okay, some people will say that Smash isn't FGC; so I'll say that Smash *and* FGC have both gotten more exciting lately)

I saw the ending of that.  XD

2nd this.

Able to watch SSBWU, Tekken 7, KOF 14 and SFV grand finals. Great plays happened and SFV finals is really good. But that Bayonetta winner is awesome. both SSMBWU and SFV are on ESPN2 :)

Wasn't Smash on Disney?