LEC Winter 2023 — new teams and community casting (so far) have not helped the league attract more viewers

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The first week of LEC Winter 2023 ended on January 23. The organizers managed to increase the Spanish-speaking audience thanks to new clubs and community casting, but the broadcasts in other languages sagged noticeably. 

New teams and updated LEC format

From 2023, there will be a Winter LEC Split, which is held before the usual Spring and Summer splits. Thus, Winter split will offer the second Mid-Season Invitationals seed, a quota for LEC Finals 2023, and ranking points. 2023 World Championship slots will now be contested in LEC Finals 2023, which will take place after Summer Split. Six teams will compete in the regional finals: the winners of three seasons and/or the top three teams by the ranking points.

Another interesting feature of the new season is new faces in the league. In July 2022, Team Heretics, an esports organization co-owned by the popular Spanish streamer TheGrefg, bought the Misfits Gaming slot in the league. Later in October of the same year, KOI, owned by another top Spanish streamer ibai announced its merger with Rogue and actually got its slot in the league. As a result, two new clubs with a lot of media support joined LEC before the start of 2023. It was representatives of these clubs whom Riot Games allowed to do community casting of the league.

All teams played three matches in the first week of LEC Winter 2023. Two teams, G2 Esports and Team Vitality, won all three of their matches. KOI and MAD Lions had two wins and one loss. Team Excel Esports, Fnatic, SK Gaming, Team BDS and Team Heretic managed to win only one series, and Astralis had the worst start, losing all of its matches.

LEC Winter 2023 First Week Results 

LEC Winter 2023 accumulated 5.6 million Hours Watched in its first game week. The Average Viewers number was 294.5K. The most popular match was Fnatic vs. KOI with 464.1K Peak Viewers. 

KOI participated in three of the five most popular matches of the first week of the split. KOI became the most watched team of the period (1.3 million HW), as well as the leader in AV number (390K).  

English became the most popular language of the first week, it accounted for 54% of total HW (and also reached 244.9K PV). French (20.3%) and Spanish (16%) are also in the Top 3. When it comes to platforms, Twitch accumulated 83.3% of total HW, while YouTube's share was 16.7%.

Comparison of LEC Winter 2023 and LEC Spring 2022 First Weeks

The first week of LEC Winter 2023 was worse than the first week of LEC Spring 2022 in every aspect — the new season fell behind by HW, AV, and PV. However, that doesn't mean the situation won't change by the end of the Split.

Despite the drop in the main metrics, it is still worth mentioning the growth of Spanish broadcasts. Thanks to the Spanish community casting (and broadcasts on the LVPes channel), the PV number in Spanish doubled. The first week of LEC Spring 2022 saw 68.2K PV, and the first week of LEC Winter 2023 saw 139.1K PV, while all other languages sagged.

Ibai became the most popular community caster of the first week. His channel alone accumulated almost 300K HW and drew 85K AV. His broadcasts reached 114.4K PV, second only to the official LEC English-language channel. Winter season matches were also broadcast on Team Heretics' channel, which accumulated 33.8K HW. Its AV number in the first week of the league was 9.6K, with the PV number of nearly 15K.

As two media clubs and the Spanish community casting were introduced, the league's audience should have increased, but midterm results showed that this has not yet happened. Perhaps the situation will change in the next stages or at the end of the season, when the decisive games for quota places kick off.