LCK Spring 2023 — did broadcasting changes hurt the viewership of the league?

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The LCK is one of the most prestigious League of Legends competitions. Since its foundation in 2012, many consider it the best league in the world, with LCK teams having won the World Championship a record seven times, more than the LPL, LEC, and PCS combined. 2022 was an excellent year for the LCK fans, which saw two teams from the league reaching the World Championship grand final for the first time since 2017. 

Coming into 2023, most of the teams underwent massive roster changes, making the league even more exciting to watch. T1 was the only team to not make any changes, and together with Dplus KIA, they came into the 2023 Spring Split as the massive favorites. Worth noting that, only one player from the DRX roster that won the 2022 World Championship remains, as the remaining players went their separate ways. Teams such as Dplus KIA, Hanwha Life Esports, and KT Rolster made significant roster changes, and on paper are much better than their 2022 edition. 

Despite losing some of their best players such as Ruler, and Prince, the LCK also saw the return of legendary ADC Viper. The league is stacked with talented players, and that was very notorious in the first two weeks of play. As of now, T1 seems unstoppable, as they sit in first place with a flawless 4-0 record. Despite being tied in the stands for second place, Dplus KIA is the second-best team in the league by a reasonable margin, with their only loss coming at the hands of T1. It has only been two weeks, but the league has already provided fans with memorable moments and some amazing matches. Fans are very excited to see how the Split develops, and they have plenty of great matches to look forward to. 

In its first two weeks, the LCK managed to reach a wide audience, and achieved some amazing viewership numbers. The matches had 205K concurrent viewers on average, with fans watching the league for an impressive 12.2 million hours, having more Hours Watched than the first two weeks of the LEC and LCS combined. It also reached an impressive 720K Peak Viewers, which came together to watch the series between T1 and Dplus KIA, two of the favorites to lift the trophy.

T1 and Dplus KIA matches also have the highest number of Average Viewers, with fans really enjoying watching both these teams play and tuning in every time they are on the rift. Worth noting that, T1 leads in the AV metric for the second straight year, and is also the most-watched team in the league so far. 

However, when we look at the viewership stats for the first two weeks of the LCK Spring 2022, we can see it wasn’t able to reach a wider audience. This year, the number of concurrent viewers dropped by 20%, with the number of Hours Watched also having a significant decrease of 23%. Only the number of simultaneous viewers went up, with the match between T1 and Dplus KIA helping the league increase by 6.7% in that metric. 

One of the major reasons for this decrease in AV and HW, is the major drop in Korean viewers, which dropped an astonishing 40% compared to the first two weeks of LCK Spring 2022. This is massive since the Korean language made up more than 50% of the HW, and is by far the most popular language of the league. This big decrease is mainly due to the fact the league ended its Korean Twitch broadcast. Now, Korean fans can watch the league only on Naveresports and on Afreecatv. This caused the league to lose a significant amount of Korean viewers, which had a great impact on its viewership.

Unfortunately, Korean wasn't the only language to see a big decrease in the Hours Watched metric, with German decreasing by an astonishing 95%, Italian by 98%, and French by 39%.  But, these languages are not as big as English or Korean, which combined made up 83% of HW. The three European languages mentioned above are only responsible for 3.9% of the total number of HW, meaning they didn't have a significant impact on the viewership of the league.

Despite that, we had some languages that were able to attract more viewers. The English language, which is the second most popular one, saw an impressive 24% increase in the number of HW in the first two weeks of the competition. Another language that also captivated the interest of more fans was Vietnamese, as the third biggest language of the league increased by 10%. Spanish had the biggest increase, with 30% more HW in the first two weeks. 

It’s also worth noting that the LCK is broadcasted in four new different languages this year, in an attempt to reach a wider audience. The league created Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, and Portuguese broadcasts, which will help the league grow its influence in these regions. 

The LCK stopped its Korean broadcast on Twitch, and made its debut on Naveresports, the streaming platform of Naver, one of the biggest web portals in South Korea. The viewership numbers didn’t come close to the ones reached on Twitch in the first two weeks of previous editions, but it's still early to say whether the move was a success or not. While in LCK Spring 2022 Twitch made up 66% of the total HW, in this edition Naveresports and Afreecatv combined made up 51% of the total HW. 

When it comes to the most popular platform, that place is now occupied by Afreecatv with 31% of HW. Surprisingly, Twitch comes second on the list, with 29.4% of the total HW. This is made even more incredible if we take into account that the Korean language is no longer broadcasted on the platform, and that many European languages saw a huge drop in viewership. 

While most platforms saw their viewership fall, YouTube saw an astronomical increase, attracting thousands of new viewers. FB number of HW increased by an astonishing 615%, while YouTube saw a smaller but still impressive 75% increase.

The LCK Spring 2023 had good viewership numbers in its first two weeks, but it's still far from the ones reached in its previous edition. LCK underwent some big changes in the broadcasting department, and compared to the same period of the LCK Spring 2022, this year's edition attracted fewer fans, despite still having decent numbers. However, it's still too early in the season to make conclusions, as only the final numbers of the split will say if these changes we positive or not. With the introduction of new languages, and the potential to reach a wider audience, we expect LCK Spring 2023 to reach great viewership numbers by the end o the Split.