Florescent’s VCT debut significantly increased viewership for the 2025 EMEA Kickoff

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The Valorant Champions Tour 2025 season has begun with the regional Kickoff tournaments for each International League. The VCT 2025: EMEA Kickoff has already hosted its first two days of matches, which reached 336,040 Peak Viewers (PV). This viewership was significantly higher than last year’s Kickoff, with an international boost coming in thanks to Ava “florescent” Eugene’s VCT debut as the first signing from Game Changers.

The opening days featured games between NAVI, Karmine Corp, Team Liquid, KOI, GiantX, and BBL Esports. These established names in the VCT EMEA have strong regional followings, and some have massively popular content creators driving viewership with co-streams. Nevertheless, Apeks against Gentle Mates emerged as the most popular match so far, emerging significantly ahead of the competition due to a combination of public interest in florescent’s performance and Gentle Mates’ own sizeable French following. 

The match between the two non-partner teams was immediately popular; only shortly after beginning, the game had reached a higher PV than all other matches. It outperformed games such as Karmine Corp vs NAVI, which was supported by over 60,000 French-speaking viewers on team founder Kamil “Kamet0” Kebir’s Twitch stream. In the final moments of the match, the peak for Apeks against Gentle Mates received over 100,000 more viewers than any other game so far.

Lucas “Squeezie” Hauchard, one of the co-founders of Gentle Mates, boasts over 5.19M Twitch Followers. He co-streamed his teams’ game against Apeks on Twitch and received over 100,000 concurrent viewers on his broadcast. On top of this sizeable French-language audience for the match, another 100,000 English-language viewers tuned in through a variety of official broadcasts and co-streamers. International viewers followed florescent’s debut with interest, leading to the highest English-language peak of the event so far. 

In terms of other notable co-casters, Ibai “Ibai” Llanos did not cover KOI’s game. The Spanish creator, who co-founded the team, has occasionally supported their matches in the past, as he did during last year’s Kickoff event. His absence from the current event resulted in a significant drop in Spanish-language viewership. However, growth in other regional audiences, such as Russian and Portuguese-speaking fans, helped offset this decline.

Compared to last year, both Average Viewers and Peak Viewers show significant growth, fuelled by the viewership for Apeks and Gentle Mates. The Average Viewers metric is significantly boosted by this game, which stands as an outlier compared to other opening day matches. Even Karmine Corp vs NAVI received roughly two-thirds of the viewership enjoyed during the non-partered teams’ game.

The strong viewership results are a start to remember for the VCT EMEA circuit. In the coming rounds, Team Vitality’s new superteam with Felipe “Less” de Loyola Basso and Nikita “Derke” Sirmitev will face Karmine Corp, 2024 Champions runner-up Team Heretics play against Gentle Mates, and Apeks are on the ropes, already in the lower-bracket of this double-elimination event. These games are likely to reach sizeable viewership, but a full list of coming matches can be explored with the Schedule tab on the event page.