Channel & language stats and dynamics for ALGS 2023 Championship

The 2022-23 ALGS season came to a close with TSM taking home first place at the 2023 Championship. Earlier in the season, viewership was extremely high and we predicted the ALGS Championship to possibly set new watch time records for the discipline. However, things didn’t work out for the Championship and it failed to even outperform the 2023 Split 2 Playoffs. What went wrong for the ALGS to so quickly lose the momentum it had been building up all year long? Here, we’ll look at how the ALGS generated such massive viewership earlier in the year and why the Championship failed to meet viewership expectations.

Viewership of 22-23 ALGS Season

Looking at the viewership for the past ALGS season, we can see that the 22-23 season received 28.2M hours of watch time, marking an 18.6% increase compared to last year. One clear reason for the increase in watch time is the new format that the ALGS introduced this year.

Coming into 2023, the ALGS revamped its tournament and broadcast schedule. In previous years, certain Group Stage matches would take place simultaneously and the event would run a B stream to cover some matches instead of on the main channel. However, the ALGS made the decision for all matches throughout all stages of the events to have their own timeslot. This meant that all matches would be broadcast on the main channel, and as a result, the event would be required to run slightly longer.

The Split 2 Playoffs in 2022 were live for just under 34 hours of Airtime, whereas in 2023 this event ran for almost 45 hours. Both the ultimate Championship event and the Split 2 Playoffs were affected by this change and benefited from the increased Airtime. While these two events benefited from increased Airtime, the Split 1 Playoffs increased its watch time through a different method.

Comparing 2023 to 2022, the Split 1 Playoffs received over 145% more watch time in 2023. With over 6.9M Hours Watched, it represents a huge increase from the previous year. A simple change in broadcasting and event scheduling wasn’t to thank here, but a consolidation of events and a change to an offline LAN event. In 2022, the Split 1 Playoffs were separated by region, meaning five separate Split 1 Playoffs events were hosted for each region.

In 2022, North America, APAC North, APAC South, EMEA, and South America all hosted Split 1 Playoffs, and these events were online events broadcast for fans of the region to watch. Moving to 2023, the Split 1 Playoffs event was changed to be an international LAN event for all of the best teams in the world to attend. This not only helped the event to amass all of its watch time in one event, rather than spread out across five regions of varying popularity but gave the Split 1 Playoffs an atmosphere of higher stakes and importance as a brand-new LAN event.

After the successful conversion of Split 1 Playoffs into an international LAN event, all eyes were now on the Split 2 Playoffs to continue the growth of the discipline. Partially thanks to the new format and extended Airtime, the Split 2 Playoffs earned enough Hours Watched to become the second-most-watched event in ALGS history. The new format heavily benefited the Playoffs stage of Split 2, giving the event an extra 11 hours of broadcasting compared to the previous year.

Most-watched Apex Legends events Most-watched Apex Legends tournaments, by Hours Watched

Although the Split 2 Playoffs 2023 was one of the most-watched events in Apex Legends’ history, it was not as popular as the events of the previous year. The 2022 Split 2 Playoffs remain the most popular Apex Legends event in the discipline’s history followed by the Championship of that year.

In fact, both the 2023 Championship and the Split 2 Playoffs were unable to break the 600K Peak Viewers barrier, something that a friendly event hosted for VTubers managed. Apex Legends is hugely popular in Japan and it appears combining the discipline with VTubers, another Japanese phenomenon, is a hit in terms of viewership.

Most popular Apex Legends tournaments, by Peak Viewers

The 2023 Championship also received more concurrent viewers at peak than the Split 2 Playoffs, although the Split 2 event received more watch time throughout its shorter Airtime. The ALGS 2023 Championship appeared to have struggled to generate watch time compared to the Split 2 Playoffs, despite being live for longer and having a higher viewership at peak.

Despite the new format for the league allowing the Championship to be broadcasted for longer, this increase in Airtime did not directly translate into more watch time. Why not? To answer this, we have to look at the language and channel dynamics of the viewership.

2022-23 Channel and Language Dynamics

The ALGS 2023 Championship received 10.6M hours of watch time and 596K concurrent viewers at peak, with Japanese and Chinese taking a much more prominent percentage of the viewership than in previous years. Japanese and Chinese are two of the major languages for the Apex Legends esports area, and in 2023 they continued to grow their audience with the help of the many community channels that broadcasted the event.

Analysing the most-watched channels of the 2023 Championship, we can see that the official playapex English-language Twitch broadcast remained the most-watched stream of the event, but lost a significant portion of its viewership compared to 2022. Community casting has taken off for the ALGS in 2023, with over 400 channels broadcasting coverage of the event, more than double the amount that was live last year. This may have diminished the viewership for the official Twitch broadcast, but it did see community casters become a much more favoured option for viewers this year.

Nicewigg was the second-most-watched channel for the Championship event, and the only community caster to break the 1M Hours Watched barrier for the entire tournament. Nicewigg is a dedicated community caster for Apex Legends, and his content has been hugely popular this year in particular: his 2023 ALGS coverage is by far the most-watched content of his Twitch channel.

Not only was he the sole English-language community caster in the top 5 most-watched channels, but he was one of the only community casters for an English audience to stream both 2022 and 2023 Championship events to record an increase in viewership for 2023. Although a community caster, nicewigg is quickly becoming a secondary main broadcast for ALGS events.

The rest of this ranking illuminates the growth of Japanese and Chinese viewership for the ALGS. RAGE is a Japanese esports organisation that handles Japanese-language broadcasts for the ALGS and YouTube channel for RAGE was hugely popular at the event, recording a 73.8% increase in watch-time compared to last year. Not only popular on YouTube but esports_rage on Twitch was also the sixth-most-watched channel of the ALGS Championship event with 531.5K Hours Watched.

Following RAGE was the Apex Global YouTube livestream, with a stable viewership of 896K Hours Watched. Although this channel did not record any growth compared to the previous year, the official YouTube broadcast was able to maintain a stable viewership whilst the Twitch broadcast suffered from a dip in watch time. YouTube Live is the preferred platform for esports in many Asian countries, including Japan, and it’s likely that Japanese and Asian viewership fueled this English-language broadcast.

Chinese viewership is growing according to our statistics, with 39% more watch time at the Championship event compared to last year, but these viewership statistics do not include Chinese live-streaming platforms. Viewership data from these platforms are unreliable and not something we can draw legitimate conclusions from. Nevertheless, Chinese-speaking community casters on Twitch and YouTube Live grew in popularity this year and restiafps on Twitch was the fifth-most-watched channel of the event, something hugely impressive for a Chinese-language stream on Twitch.

Comparing the Hours Watched for each of the most-watched languages in the 2022 and 2023 Championships, we can clearly see that English lost its advantage as the most dominant language of the broadcasts. In 2023, English lost viewership in terms of watch time, whereas languages like Japanese, Chinese, and French all received a boost from their respective community casters.

Japanese is quickly becoming the most popular language for ALGS broadcasts, and if the trends of this season continue into the upcoming years it may overtake English to become the most popular language for the discipline. In 2022, Japanese-language broadcasts made up 18.6% of the total watch time for the Championship, and this figure grew to 25.8% in 2023.

The ALGS showed substantial growth in 2023 but failed to increase the viewership for the final event of the year. Despite this, the discipline still managed to grow in terms of watch time for the season. The new and longer format of the event schedule helped the ALGS to increase its watch time even though the events struggled to match the peak concurrent viewers compared to 2022. With the new format helping the ALGS to reach new heights in terms of watch time, maybe the rapidly growing Japanese and Chinese audiences for the discipline can help it achieve the peak viewership it garnered in 2022. It’s a shame that the ALGS wasn’t able to grow all of its major events in the same year, but nevertheless, watch time is rising for the discipline and it will likely continue to develop its audience around the globe.