LCK Road to MSI becomes the most popular desktop esports event of 2025
The LCK Road to MSI 2025, which acts as the qualifier for the top Korean regional circuit to the two mid-season League of Legends international championships, concluded on June 15. Thanks to the nation's top three sides putting on a show that everyone expected, it created quite a few viewership records for the year.
The LCK Road to MSI 2025 saw the top six teams from Rounds 1-2 of the LCK 2025 Season compete for more than just bragging rights. The top two would represent Korea at the Mid-Season Invitational 2025 and the Esports World Cup 2025, looking to maintain the country's recent dominance at global events.
The LCK Road to MSI 2025 saw Gen.G and T1 finish in the top two and qualify for the MSI 2025. However, since the world champion was directly invited to the EWC 2025 as its defending champion, it allowed the next-best side, Hanwha Life Esports, to qualify as Korea's third representative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The format of the LCK Road to MSI 2025 was such that one slip-up could cost a team its qualification dreams. This was especially true for T1, the game's most popular team, which had a maximum of two games to play but could still have not made it to the MSI 2025 if it lost either affair.
It was this jeopardy behind the matches of Lee "Faker" Sang-hyeok & Co that helped carry this LoL competition's viewership, as both its encounters topped the most popular matches table. In fact, the top series, the Round 5 clash against Hanwha Life Esports, which acted as a virtual final in terms of qualification for the MSI, attracted over 1.96 million Peak Viewers (PV), a massive number for an event that serves as a qualifier for a prominent tournament.
This also means that the LCK Road to MSI 2025 has become the most popular League of Legends event this year. Such was the hype behind the journey of T1 that this event almost doubled the peak concurrent viewership figure put up by the year's first global competition, the debuting First Stand 2025.
The 1.96 million peak live viewers this LCK event reached also made it the most popular tournament of 2025 that was not from Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. The top name on this leaderboard, unsurprisingly, is the ongoing MPL Indonesia Season 15, which touched a humongous 4.13 million PV.
MLBB remains the only esports game so far this year to cross the 2 million peak concurrent viewers barrier. Two of its events have done so, with the other one being the ESL Snapdragon Pro Series: Mobile Masters 2025, which was the grand finale of the ESL Snapdragon Pro Series Year 3 season and the first major international Mobile Legends tournament of the year.
MLBB may have the upper hand when it comes to the fight with LoL for the most popular esports event of 2025, but Riot Games' PC MOBA can take solace in another important stat. It has become the most consistently watched esports competition of the year with 752,208 Average Viewers (AV).
No other tournament can come close to matching this figure, with the next-best entry being the First Stand 2025. As a result, the two most-watched esports events this year by average viewership have come from LoL, reiterating its status as the eminent game by audience reach in the competitive gaming sphere.
Korean audiences continue to show up and show out when supporting their teams and home leagues in LoL. The LCK Road to MSI 2025 is a testament to this fact, with fans from this East Asian country making even a qualifying event a big deal thanks to their support of popular teams like T1.
Speaking of T1, it remains the gold standard among LoL teams when it comes to the ability to pull in viewers. Whether its performances are good or not, the two-time reigning world champion can always be banked on to help each tournament reach its viewership potential as long as it reaches the latter stages.
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