How Worlds viewership has evolved over time

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With less than a month to go until arguably the biggest esports event of the year, the 2025 League of Legends World Championship, fans are already buzzing. In recent years, the tournament has set the standard for production quality and consistently broken viewership records. But how has its audience evolved, and what’s behind the recent spikes in popularity? Let’s take a closer look.

Technically, the Worlds series started in 2011, but the inaugural tournament didn’t carry the “World Championship” subtitle, and the main LoL esports trophy, the Original Summoner’s Cup, was only introduced in the second competitive season. Esports Charts didn’t exist back then, so our analysis begins with the 2016 Worlds. That year’s tournament is notable both on its own and for our company, as it was the first event where we collected full statistics, beginning with the Playoffs.

Note: the numbers below exclude viewership from Chinese platforms like DouYu and Huya, which don’t publicly report live viewers. They track audience engagement using different metrics that can’t be directly compared with Western services like YouTube or Twitch. As a result, our figures differ from those released by Riot Games. Learn more.

From 2016 to 2018, Worlds’ peak viewership hovered around 1.5-2.1 million live viewers. The series saw its first major spike in 2019, when the peak nearly doubled, largely thanks to Riot Games’ initial push into co-streaming.

Before 2019, Worlds coverage was mostly limited to official Riot channels and those of third-party studios or regional LoL tournament organizers. Influencers were rarely part of the broadcast. Starting in 2019, however, co-casters became far more active. The number of channels covering the tournament almost doubled, and among the co-streamers was Gustavo “Baiano” Gomes, now a star of Brazilian LoL.

Riot’s early move into co-casting paid off, but it didn’t translate into major audience growth in the years that followed. Between 2019 and 2021, Worlds’ peak viewership hovered between 3.88 and 4.01 million live viewers. Year-to-year changes were mostly determined by whether a few more channels joined the coverage.

The next major leap, and one that marked a qualitative shift leading to sustained growth in Worlds’ audience over the past three years, came in 2022. For the first time, peak viewership exceeded 5 million live viewers, even though the average audience actually dipped. What fueled this spike? Riot Games started bringing in more influencers who weren’t directly tied to LoL.

  Ibai’s (second from the right) example demonstrated that broader co-casting can attract a much larger audience / Image via Ibai's social media  

Since 2019, co-casters had mostly been current or former pro players and coaches, drawing a decent but limited audience. Starting in 2022, creators whose main content wasn’t LoL also joined the co-cast. A standout example that year was Spain’s top streamer, Ibai “Ibai” Llanos, who streamed only the finals, but that was enough to make a massive impact, bringing in over 480,000 concurrent viewers.

In recent years, this trend has continued to grow: co-casters are now active throughout the whole tournament, and there are more of them than ever: almost every region and language group now has alternatives to the official broadcasts.

  T1’s recent achievements have been just as important in driving the series’ audience growth as the expansion of broadcasts / Image via Riot Games   

While viewing options for the tournament have expanded, the series’ overall audience growth was also boosted by a factor beyond the organizers’ control: the resurgence of T1, who reached the finals in each of the last three World Championships.

T1 dominated the LoL scene in the mid-2010s, but the team later went through a slump and then a full-blown crisis, which led to their absence from Worlds 2020. Even so, T1 and their star player, Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, remain not just the most popular LoL team, but arguably the most popular esports team in the world by a wide margin.

Having T1 in the finals almost guarantees a tournament’s success, since far more viewers watch them than any other team. Last year, for instance, their average viewership was 900,000 live viewers higher than the next closest team at Worlds.

The growth of Worlds’ audience over the years has been driven by a mix of strategic decisions and fortunate circumstances. Riot Games’ expansion of co-casting, bringing in both pro players and mainstream influencers, helped broaden the tournament’s reach and engage viewers across regions and languages. At the same time, T1’s remarkable performances and the presence of stars like Faker created moments that naturally drew massive audiences, independent of the organizers’ efforts. In other words, Worlds’ rising viewership has been shaped both by smart broadcasting strategies and by the unpredictably magnetic appeal of the players themselves.

Worlds 2025 will run from October 14 to November 9 in China. For all the latest details on the tournament, check out our full guide.