Horizon Cup — how the first major international LoL: Wild Rift tournament went

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Horizon Cup is the first international championship in the mobile discipline League of Legends: Wild Rift that ended last weekend. Team SoloMid, Team Secret and KT Rolster and others took part in the tournament — the teams competed for an impressive prize money pool of $500K. Let us tell you what else made the tournament memorable, and how many viewers followed the matches.

Riot Games promoted Horizon Cup as the first significant international event in LoL: Wild Rift (the game will be a year old in December). The developers emphasized that this event was not a world championship, but could definitely claim this status by the scale of the tournament.

Chinese team Da Kun Gaming became the winner of the Horizon Cup

Unlike the vast majority of events during pandemic, Horizon Cup was held in LAN format, though without spectators. The event was hosted at the Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre in Singapore, where Riot Games set up a beautiful stage.

The second important feature of the tournament was a large prize pool. Ten teams competed for as much as $500K! For comparison, last main tournament of the much more popular discipline Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (M2 World Championship) had a prize money pool of only $300K, though at its peak the event was watched by 1.7 million people, which is a lot more than the Horizon Cup audience.

Horizon Cup was on air for 45 hours and in that time it accumulated 1.6 million Hours Watched. Peak Viewers number was reached on the first day of the group stage during the match between Team Secret (represented by the Filipino squad) and ThunderTalk Gaming from China. Their game attracted 62,8K spectators. Three more tournament's most popular matches also took place on the first day.

The final between ThunderTalk Gaming and Da Kun Gaming was only the third most watched match of the tournament with 54K Peak Viewers. It was due to the fact that the most popular teams did not make it to the final: Team Secret, TSM, and EBG left the tournament in the group stage.

The most popular Horizon Cup teams by Hours Watched

ThunderTalk Gaming was the most popular team by Hours Watched with 557K hours. This is 28% more than the winner of the event, Da Kun Gaming, had — the team played on one map fewer at the tournament.

The leader by the Average Viewers number at the matches was TSM, though the team didn't even reach the playoffs. ThunderTalk Gaming and Da Kun Gaming took second and third places, respectively.

Horizon Cup 2021 audience

Horizon Cup showed unwonted statistics for mobile disciplines by platforms. The tournament was streamed on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook and NimoTV, with Twitch accounting for the highest Hours Watched number at 66.2% of the total. It should be noted that this platform is far from being popular among mobile gaming fans. For example, the main audience of the biggest Free Fire, PUBG Mobile and ML:BB championships follows them on YouTube, Nimo and other services.

The audience of the first international League of Legends: Wild Rift event was affected by the tournament being broadcast on the official Twitch channels (riotgames, lck_korea and riotgamesru) of its desktop counterpart — League of Legends.

Viewers of the English-language broadcasts generated the most Hours Watched, accounting for 29% of the total. In second place was the viewers from Korea with 17%. Portuguese, Vietnamese and Spanish were also in the top five languages.

The most popular channel was wildriftesports with 15K Peak Viewers. Second place went to riotgames, while the top 3 was rounded out by the Vietnamese official YouTube channel of LoL:WR.

Horizon Cup vs. other LoL competitions: Is Wild Rift a success or a failure?

Top-5 most popular LoL: WR events by Peak Viewers 

Horizon Cup was the second most popular event by Peak Viewers. Twitch Rivals' Wild Rift Invitational is still in first place: the event took place in 2020 and attracted twice as many viewers. It is too early to draw parallels with other popular mobile MOBAs: Wild Rift is barely common in Asia, compared with its rivals like ML:BB or Arena of Valor.

According to Riot Games, we are about to see the first full-fledged esports season of LoL: Wild Rift which culminates in the inaugural Wild Rift World Championship. However, no other details about the season are known yet.