First Stand 2025 hits new viewership peak, yet still struggles with audience consistency
The group stage of First Stand 2025, this season’s first international League of Legends tournament, is nearing its end. On Day 4, we finally saw a new viewership peak, unsurprisingly, during a showdown between the event’s two most popular teams. While the tournament has now surpassed 800,000 concurrent viewers, overall audience growth might have been better.
Following Day 4, two teams have locked in their playoff spots: South Korea’s winter champions, Hanwha Life Esports, and the pan-Asian region’s top squad, CTBC Flying Oyster. The final two matches are set for tomorrow, and while every team still has a shot at making the playoffs, Karmine Corp faces the slimmest odds: their qualification now hinges on their rivals' results rather than their own performance.
KC had a great opportunity to boost their chances of advancing to the next stage if they’d defeated tournament favorites, HLE, today. Although the French squad fought solidly and took a game off their opponents, they ultimately fell short. While they may not have much to celebrate in terms of results, their viewership numbers are another story: their match became the most popular so far in the tournament, surpassing the previous peak (set on Day 1 with the Korea vs. China derby between HLE and Top Esports) by 19%.
Although the tournament hit a new viewership peak, its overall audience numbers are still far from exceptional. We touched on the main reasons for the lower viewer engagement in our Day 1 recap, and the primary one is the inconvenient time zone (the tournament is taking place in Korea), which makes it tough for American and European audiences to tune in since the matches start too late or too early for them. The current peak of the tournament was hit during the final map of the second match of the day when Europe had more or less woken up, and had the KC vs. HLE match been scheduled as the first of the day, it certainly wouldn’t have hit that peak.
One interesting takeaway after four days of the tournament: community casting really makes a difference. While the initial peak on Day 1 was achieved with almost identical viewership between official and unofficial streams, the advantage of co-casting became much clearer in the following days.
Activating co-casters is arguably the key factor that could help boost viewership in the final day of the group stage and the playoffs, but it all depends on the results of tomorrow’s matches. There's still a chance that both European and American (Team Liquid) teams will make it to the final stage, which will be crucial for viewership, as co-casters from these regions can make a significant impact.
However, even with such an ideal outcome (from a viewership perspective, of course), it’s still uncertain whether the situation will improve much. The playoff games are set to start at 4:00 AM London time, which is extremely early for Europe and quite late for America.
We’ll see how things play out in practice very soon! Be sure to follow the tournament and its viewership performance on Esports Charts.
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