DRX will not be defending worlds crown after LCK Regional Finals 2023 exit

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The LCK Regional Finals 2023, conducted at the LoL Park in Seoul, South Korea, to determine the two remaining sides to accompany the already-qualified duo to the 2023 World Championship, concluded on August 26. Despite the main event continuing the trend of record-setting viewership for regional leagues, the regional finals was only the third-most-popular event in the series, with a shocking result and T1’s absence serving as major contributing factors.

After three days of action between four sides (apart from the summer split winner Gen.G and the leader in the Championship Points table, T1), KT Rolster and Dplus sealed their berths in the highly coveted esports event. Hanwha Life Esports had a hard time, first losing to KT Rolster 3:1 in the Upper Bracket Final before falling to Dplus by the same scoreline in the Lower Bracket Final to hand those two sides qualified status.

  Basic stats, popular matches, and qualified sides from the LCK Regional Finals 2023   

The LCK Regional Finals 2023 recorded 507K Peak Viewers during the Lower Bracket Final clash between Hanwha Life Esports and Dplus. These are two of the more popular sides in the league, which was the case here as well (by average concurrent viewers), and with qualification at stake, fans arrived in droves to see who would take that final LCK spot at the Worlds. Another indicator of this fact is that their match did 32.6% better than the next-best entry, the Upper Bracket Final between Hanwha Life Esports and KT Rolster.

The event was most watched on YouTube, as the official Korean-language broadcasts are hosted there. This was a change from last year, where Twitch was number one, while another platform fell by around 3% compared to the LCK Regional Finals 2022. Like the summer split, the famous Korean live-streaming platform and an online TV broadcast almost equaled the viewership of the purple streaming giant when combined.

Despite the shift in platform dynamics, the share of languages remained almost the same, with Korean leading the chart. All this also helped this year's iteration register 2.9M Hours Watched and 281K Average Viewers over ten hours of airtime.

The LCK Regional Finals was only the third most popular event in the series, behind the 2020 and 2021 editions, which benefitted from having more people available to watch them thanks to the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic's lockdown era. What didn't help was that defending world champion DRX, who went from the Play-In stage to the title with just two losses, was knocked out at the first hurdle — the Lower Bracket Semifinal — by Dplus.

Moreover, T1, the most followed side in Korean LoL, was present at the two most popular competitions mentioned above, while it has managed to get direct entry into the Worlds in the last two iterations. Gen.G was also present in 2020 and knowing the historic rivalry between these two, it is easy to see why it remains number one on this list.

What is undoubted is that the LCK remains the stronghold for League of Legends esports globally, with viewership stats backing this claim. As a result, its teams will be heavy favorites to go all the way come the 2023 World Championship, which kicks off on October 10 in Seoul and Busan and runs until November 19.