Intermediate Results of Icons Global Championship 2022: Viewership Analysis Prior to Playoffs

The group stage of Icons Global Championship 2022 — the largest Wild Rift championship with a prize pool of $2 million — ended on June 25. In a new Esports Charts article, we sum up the intermediate results of the event and try to figure out how the mobile MOBA by Riot Games feels compared to the competitors in the genre.

Tournament Intermediate Results

There were 24 teams at IGC 2022 in Singapore, but only eight of them made it to the playoffs. Among them are: Nova Esports, Team Flash, J Team, Rex Regum Qeon, FunPlus Phoenix, Flash Wolves, JD Gaming and KT Rolster. It should be noted that the final part of the tournament did not have representatives of Europe and the United States. Neither Immortals, nor Sentinels competed against the teams from China and Southeast Asia.

It is not easy to determine a favorite in the playoffs, but the teams from China are worth special attention, since they took first place in the group stages. FunPlus Phoenix, which won WRL 2022 Season 1 before going to IGC 2022, looks the strongest among them. Rex Regum Qeon from the Philippines will have to do its best to defeat this Chinese team. Nova Esports should have no problem with KT Rolster in the parallel match. The lower brackets have more questions and intrigue, as they include almost equally strong teams — the Chinese J Team and JD Gaming may well compete with Flash Wolves from Taiwan and Team Flash from Vietnam.

Playoff matches begin on July 1, and the championship ends on July 9 at the Suntec Convention and Exhibition Center. The winner will receive $640K.

IGC 2022 Scene. Source: twitter.com/WildRiftEsports

Viewership Statistics

The results of Western teams at the tournament are not as good as they could be, but that's not the only thing Riot Games should be thinking about. The first red flag is the gradual outflow of the tournament audience. The first day of the Play-In had 53.9K Peak Viewers, but by the last day of the stage it dropped to 30.8K (-29.5%). At the beginning of the group stage the situation stabilized a bit — the Peak Viewers number rose to 50.4K people, but by the last day of the stage it dropped to 35.8K (-29%). The situation is similar with the total number of Hours Watched, which is declining from day to day.

This statistic is illustrative because usually the audience of a tournament grows proportionally: the closer to the finals, the more viewers are on the broadcasts, which means that the numbers should be increasing, not decreasing. Let's see if the situation changes in the playoffs.

The second interesting point is the proportions of broadcast languages in relation to the total number of Hours Watched. During the Play-In and the group stage, the tournament totaled 1.93 million HW. English accounts for 37.7%, Portuguese for 26.01% and Spanish for 8.45%. It should be noted that the main market for mobile MOBAs is China and Southeast Asia. As we mentioned above, the teams that made it to the playoffs are from these regions.

The Peak Viewers number on the English broadcast, which is the main one, was 26.1K. However, the statistics of the Korean broadcast is also very illustrative here, since it is one of the key regions for Riot Games and League of Legends. The Peak Viewer number in this region was reached during the fourth game day and totaled 18.5K people. It is worth noting that this result is largely due to a raid of viewers from the official LCK channel. But without that, the number would have been much more modest.

As for the Philippine and Chinese broadcasts, the PV number there was 3.1K and 2.9K viewers*, respectively, although the representatives of these countries had the highest results in the tournament.

Viewership dynamics and language distribution

The most popular team in the first two stages is the Philippine Rex Regum Qeon. Its matches were watched by 35.3K Average Viewers. The Top 3 also includes J Team from China (34.1K) and Unsold Stuff Gaming from Japan (33.4K). It is worth noting that peaks were recorded on several broadcasts at once during the match between RRQ and USG.

Wild Rift and its rivals: comparison

In order to make the Icons Global Championship 2022 stats clearer, we should compare them to other mobile MOBA tournaments. MLBB Southeast Asia Cup 2022 ended recently in Malaysia. Despite the fact that the teams competed there for "only" $300K total prize pool, the viewership statistics of this tournament outpaced the Wild Rift one by dozens of times. For example, the Peak Viewers number of MLBB Southeast Asia Cup 2022 was 2.8 million against 53.4K at Wild Rift, and the English broadcast gathered 146.9K people against 26.1K at IGC 2022.

Another example is Arena of Valor International Championship 2022 with a prize pool of $2 million, which is taking place right now in Vietnam (in a hybrid online/LAN format). It ends on July 10, but you can already see some trends by looking at the numbers. The total PV number at all broadcasts is 405K, the Average Viewers number is 172K, and they are quite higher than IGC 2022 results.

Icons vs MSC vs AIC

We can note some interesting moments when analyzing these three events. Wild Rift organizers focused on Twitch in terms of coverage, while the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and Arena of Valor tournaments were mainly broadcast on YouTube and, to a lesser extent, on Facebook. The main language of the IGC 2022 tournament was English, although most of the participants were from China and Southeast Asia. At MLBB Southeast Asia Cup 2022 the priority broadcast was an Indonesian one, and at Arena of Valor International Championship 2022 — a Vietnamese one. In both cases, this corresponded to the participants more.

Detailed stats on these and other esports tournaments are available with Streams Charts PRO subscription: check out its benefits here.

* — statistics from Chinese streaming services not included due to unreliability of data they provide. Icons is covered on Taiwanese (labelled as Chinese) on non-Chinese services.