SWC2023 World Finals reaffirms discipline as niche esport choice

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The SWC2023 World Finals was held on November 4 at the ICONSIAM shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand. It brought together the best players from around the world and ended as the eighth-most popular event in the series and the seventh-most popular edition of this particular competition.

After qualifiers for three Regional Cups, the China Qualification Match, and the Open Qualifier - Thailand, eight players advanced to the World Finals. At the end of it all, LEST beat TrueWhale 3:1 in the best-of-five Finals to emerge as the champion and take home $100K out of the total prize pool of $214K. The runner-up pocketed $20K while the third and fourth-placed pros got richer by $10K each.

  Basic stats and most successful streamers at the SWC2023 World Finals   

This Summoners War competition recorded 155K Hours Watched, 34K Peak Viewers, and 26K Average Viewers over around six hours of airtime. Of course, it peaked towards the end of the broadcast, when LEST was crowned the winner after his win in the summit clash.

For those unaware, this tournament had Regional Cups for Europe, Americas, and Asia-Pacific, with the top two from each segment advancing to the World Finals. Before that, players were selected for each region based on their records in World Arena Season 24 and Season 25, being invited to participate in the preliminaries.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube was the most preferred service for Summoners War fans to catch the action live, eating more than 80% of the total watch time. Meanwhile, two Asian languages made the top three in the corresponding overall chart that was led by English.

Speaking of streaming, NeVeR_LosEs was the most popular individual channel to stream the SWC2023 World Finals. The Taiwanese content creator is known for dabbling mainly in the Just Chatting genre, but he is no stranger to covering esports events live, with his two most viewed recent games also including League of Legends, whose world championship is ongoing.

YouTuber SeanB was the third most popular and second-most watched broadcaster. He has solely been concentrating on this game over the last few days, and that attention paid off as he was a major reason for the event doing as well as it did.

  Most popular Summoners War competitions of all time   

Looking at the entire viewership picture, the SWC2023 World Finals finished as the eighth most popular tournament, with only the top one, the SWC2019 Worlds Finals, hitting three figures for peak viewership. Among World Finals editions, it was the seventh-most viewed in terms of peak online viewers.

This continued a trend of falling stats for the game's esports scene since 2021, and there seems to be no discernable pattern as to why. One aspect related to streaming was that Com2usUSA, the official Twitch handle of the game’s developer, was active a lot less this time compared to the previous edition, which played a part in the lower numbers.

Moreover, with the significant proliferation of similar games and esports of famous disciplines like League of Legends, Valorant, and FIFA getting bigger and bigger, Summoners War has fallen into a niche bracket, not very dissimilar to Quake or Halo. That does not mean it is a bad thing, but expecting its events competitions to reach the viewership levels it did in the few years preceding the pandemic might be asking too much.

However, there is also the indisputable fact that esports has never been bigger, and such disciplines and their esports setting will always have a place in the bigger picture, especially for burned-out fans looking for a change of pace or scenery.