Worlds 2023 Chat & Audio analysis: correlation, top teams, players, and sponsors
The League of Legends 2023 World Championship has come and gone, leaving 146M+ hours of watch time and a new esports concurrent viewership record behind. Esports Charts PRO subscribers can browse the most popular teams of any event on the relevant permanent page, but not only raw viewership statistics decide the popularity of the teams.
Thanks to our analysts and extensive live-stream data, Esports Charts has collated the most-mentioned teams, players, and sponsors of the World Championship. These rankings are not decided by viewership statistics such as Average Viewers but rather by how many times they were mentioned in Twitch chat and the official broadcast stream audio.
Mentioned teams, players, and sponsors of Worlds 2023
Throughout the Knockout Stage of the event, T1 was the most-mentioned team by the broadcasting team of the official Riot Games Twitch channel. T1 enjoyed a substantial gap to the remaining teams, followed by Weibo Gaming in second place.
Naturally, the amount of times a team was mentioned on stream directly correlates with the amount of time each team spent on the broadcast. This ranking of the top 5 most-mentioned teams is identical to the top 5 teams when ranked by Airtime during the Knockout Stage, with one exception.
Weibo Gaming was the team with the most Airtime during the Knockout Stage, having enjoyed 55 minutes more time on air than T1. T1’s achievement of managing to become the most-mentioned team by such a significant margin is even more impressive when their Airtime compared to Weibo Gaming is taken into account.
Surprisingly, Faker was the only member of the championship-winning T1 roster to rank within the top 5 most-mentioned finalists. TheShy was the most-mentioned player of the playoffs, having been mentioned a whopping 538 times.
Turning towards the sponsors of the events, the most-mentioned sponsors by Twitch chat and stream audio differ in some key ways. MasterCard was the most-mentioned sponsor of the event in Twitch chat, likely benefitting from the extremely hyped Opening Ceremony.
Cisco came second in the Twitch chat rankings, but only 5th in the stream audio. Cisco presented the replays for the analyst desk, being mentioned by the analysts from time to time as they observed the key moments of the match.
Oppo and Verizon appeared on one ranking each, Twitch chat and stream audio respectively. Oppo hosted the Player of the Series award for the event, whereas Verizon presented the post-game interviews of each match. Although both sponsors were shown on the broadcast a similar amount of times, as both utilised post-game integrations, the data shows the broadcast audio was much more likely to mention Verizon rather than Oppo.
Read also: How Worlds sponsor integrations changed over a year
Red Bull was the most-mentioned sponsor by the broadcast for the event, benefitting from a sleek integration to the analyst desk. Compared to 2022, where the analyst desk featured a centre-piece logo from sponsor StateFarm, Red Bull opted for a less intrusive sponsorship integration at Worlds 2023. Red Bull cans were placed on the analyst desk, and a small Red Bull fridge was placed off to the left of the frame. Despite the less visually intrusive integration, Red Bull was mentioned 43 times by the stream broadcast.
Chat and audio dynamics for the Knockout Stage
Utilising our extensive live-streaming data, we can plot the dynamics of Twitch chat for the official Riot Games broadcast during the entire Knockout Stage of Worlds 2023. One immediately striking data point is the spike in Twitch chat activity during Quarterfinals Day 4 and Semifinals Day 2.
Both of these matches featured T1, firstly against LNG Esports in the Quarterfinals and then against JD Gaming during the Semifinals. In case the raw viewership statistics weren't proof enough, these spikes are another piece of evidence towards T1’s untouchable popularity in the League of Legends esports scene.
During the Grand Final between T1 and Weibo Gaming, chat reached peak hype when T1 secured the first map victory of the series. As T1 took the lead in the match, more than 5.6K Twitch chat messages were recorded in less than 5 minutes. This slightly overshadowed the moment T1 won the entire match and became world champions, as 5.3K chat messages were recorded then.
Looking at the Grand Final of Worlds 2023 in more detail, we can analyse both the amount of messages generated by Twitch chat as well as the amount of words that came out of the casters’ mouths. Immediately clear is that these two datasets do not follow each other, but feature stark differences during key moments.
As the pre-Finals broadcast began, Twitch chat activity was very low compared to the busy stream audio. During the first hour of broadcasting, Twitch chat averaged only 480 messages a minute. However, this increased to 746 messages a minute during the next hour, which featured the Opening Ceremony.
The Opening Ceremony, which was presented by Mastercard, featured NewJeans, a K-pop group, Heartsteel, a new boy-band K-pop group from Riot Games, and spectacular augmented reality effects. The ceremony was hugely popular among fans of the event: clearly visible in the spike in Twitch chat activity.
NewJeans’ performance during the Worlds 2023 Final Opening Ceremony The spike reached during the Opening Ceremony was equal to the spike during the winning moment of the Final: a dream scenario for any opening act to be as hyped as the winning moment of the main event. This spectacular ceremony was likely what drove Mastercard to the top of Twitch chat mentions during the Knockout stage, as fans from around the world fell in love with the eye-catching act.
During the break between Map 1 and 2 of the Final, the broadcast showed various advertisements, including some for League of Legends itself. The official broadcast teased both the 2024 Season of the game as well as an upcoming new Champion, Hwei. Hwei was mentioned during the Champion Roadmap October 2023 article by Riot Games, but this was the first time fans got an up-and-close look at the new Champion and some of his abilities.
Twitch chat reached its ultimate spike in activity as the third and final map of the match came to a close. As T1 claimed their fourth world championship title, Twitch chat exploded into over 1.2K messages in a single minute. With the help of T1’s global viewership, League of Legends has officially set a new esports viewership record, and Twitch chat was there to spam as hard as it could.
Worlds 2023 officially became the most popular esports event ever. The peak viewership reached 6.4M Peak Viewers across all channels covering the event during the third map of the final, and the official Riot Games Twitch channel reached 824K PV. League of Legends continues to grow and outperform itself year after year, and the discipline is showing no signs of showing down. Stay up to date on all the viewership trends and growing regions in the esports industry with Esports Charts.
