How community casting and new format influenced Mid-Season Invitational 2023's popularity

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The Mid-Season Invitational 2023 kicked off today, May 9, featuring the top teams of LCK. The Play-In, which took place in a new format, ended two days earlier, and combined with the introduction of community casting, has had a big effect on the tournament's viewership statistics.

Mid-Season Invitational 2023 Viewer Stats

The format of the 2023 Mid-Season Invitational has undergone a big change. The tournament is now split into two stages of the same format, with teams competing in double-elimination brackets. Play-In featured bo3 matches along with bo5 lower bracket final, while the playoffs (or Bracket Stage) include only best-of-5 matches. 

The new system allowed the organizers to eliminate the issue of improper team seeding while also reducing the number of matches in each stage. Now, teams compete against opponents that have comparable strengths, and favorites and underdogs are never placed in the same group, as was the case in Group C last season. 

MSI 2023 Play-In Stage Viewership 

MSI 2023 Play-In Stage intermediate viewership statistics

As a result of the new format, Riot Games was able to cut down on the number of matches while increasing their significance and audience interest. The Mid-Season Invitational 2023 Play-In had a 33.8% shorter airtime than the Group Stage of the previous competition. However, thanks to a rise in viewers, the overall number of Hours Watched only fell only by 19%. Also, 536.2K Average Viewers tuned in to watch MSI 2023 Play-In, which is a 21.5% increase over last year's group stage. The number of Peak Viewers also grew significantly, being up 18.5%.

The most popular game of the stage was the series between G2 Esports and LOUD, which took place on the first day of the tournament — it was watched by 971.6K Peak Viewers. In comparison, the most popular match of the MSI 2022 Group Stage attracted only 819.9K PV (T1 played against DetonatioN FocusMe).

The English broadcasts of the Play-In stage accumulated the most Hours Watched, 27.8% of the total of the entire stage. However, the leader by the Peak Viewers was Portuguese, 309.7K PV. We should note that the Portuguese-language broadcasts achieved this result thanks to the community casting.

Most popular MSI 2023 Play-In Stage teams

The leader of the Play-In by Hours Watched was Talon Esports from Taiwan. As for the Average Viewers at the matches, the most popular team of the stage was G2 Esports. 

We should also note the activity of fans from Brazil, who primarily watched the LOUD matches. Brazilian streamer Baiano broadcast all LOUD games and became the most popular community streamer of the whole stage. One of his streams was watched by more than 155K Peak Viewers, which became a personal record for Baiano.

We should remind you that in 2023, Riot Games allowed community casting for the first time in the history of the Mid-Season Invitational. Many popular content creators, including Ibai, Baiano, Caedrel, Shaka, Coringa, and others began covering the tournament on their personal channels. The total number of channels more than doubled compared to the last year's tournament.

So far, Riot Games' experiment with the new MSI format has paid off, and the introduction of community casting has already helped the tournament gather more Average Viewers than last year's broadcasts. Recall that last year's Mid-Season Invitational 2022 was the most popular tournament of the series in terms of Peak Viewers (2.2 million PV), and the current event has a good chance of renewing that number.