Results and New Viewership Record of LCK 2021 Summer

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On August 28, the regional Korean league LCK 2021 Summer came to an end. South Korea is one of the most popular regions of the League of Legends, and its teams often take first places in worldwide competitions. In our new piece, Esports Charts will tell you how the final stage of the summer split went, which teams became the most popular, and how the new record was set.

We previously talked about the results of the LCK 2021 Summer Group Stage in this article.

Overall stats of LCK 2021 Summer and new record

Only ten teams participated in LCK 2021 Summer, and they fought for 336K dollars. The league ran from June 9 to August 28 and was 295 hours on air. It could be watched on four platforms: Twitch, YouTube, AfreecaTV, and Facebook (not including Chinese services). This season, surprisingly, the Naver TV platform was excluded. However, this company is considered the analog of Google in South Korea.

Twitch became the leader by viewers with 826K spectators at the peak, most of which watched the /LCK and /LCK_Korea channels. The tournament was officially broadcast in seven languages, which directly affected the diversity of the audience. 63% of Hours Watched were contributed by viewers of Korean broadcasts, 19% — English, and 11% — Vietnamese.

In total, the league gathered 60.5M Hours Watched and 1.3M viewers at the peak of the finals between T1 and DWG.KIA! This number became a record for the Korean region, surpassing all previous competitions.

The reason for the new record is in the excitement and competitiveness of T1 and DWG.KIA. Both teams have a considerable number of achievements and took first places at the Worlds. After the rebranding, DWG.KIA reached second place in MSI 2021, and T1 was inactive for a couple of months before LCK 2021 Summer. Moreover, the last meeting of these two teams was during the Group Stage of LCK Spring 2021. Therefore, many fans of the Korean LoL scene were waiting for a clash between two teams.

As a result, even Group Stage matches between these teams entered the top 5 most popular matches, although usually, most spectators prefer to watch only the playoffs.

DWG.KIA or T1 — who is more popular?

DWG.KIA became the champions of LCK 2021 Summer, but T1 is clearly in the lead in Average Viewers. They overtook DWG by 30%. Gen.G Esports became the third most popular team of LCK 2021 Summer with 241K spectators on average, and they finished third in the tournament. The top 5 teams by Hours Watched remains the same.

What’s next?

This is not the end of the Korean regional competition. We have an additional stage of LCK 2021 Regional Finals ahead between four teams: Hanwha Life, Liiv SANDBOX, NS RedForce, and T1. According to the results of this tournament, the participants of Worlds 2021 will be determined. The first place winner will enter the main stage, and the second place will start from the Play-In. The event will take place from August 31 to September 2.

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