Legends of Runeterra World Championship 2021: Viewership Stats and Tournament Results

Legends of Runeterra is a card game from Riot Games set in the League of Legends universe. Given the presence of esports competitions dedicated to it, the new article will have Esports Charts overview the discipline’s main tournament, the Legends of Runeterra World Championship – which brought together the best players of the pro scene.

The game itself was released in 2020, resulting in a limited number of competitions so far. In particular, this world championship was the first in the history of the discipline. In total, 16 players from Europe, Asia, and America took part in the championship and competed for the prize fund of $200K.

To qualify for the competition, players competed in regional qualifiers. During these, America stood out the most: 7.6K Peak Viewers and 35.2K Hours Watched. At the same time, the competition was not favored by Asian viewers: gathering merely 421 Peak Viewers from the respective region.

The performance of the main competition was much better. The event was on air for 25 hours and the match between the Pole alanzq and the Japanese Yamato has gathered 44K Peak Viewers. The tournament was broadcast on Twitch and YouTube, with the first platform being responsible for 78% of Hours Watched.

The entirety of broadcast viewers can be roughly split into 14 categories, but we have only highlighted the most popular ones. The viewers of English-speaking broadcasts were responsible for 67% of Hours Watched, and 9% more were brought by the viewers of Portuguese-speaking ones.

The most popular channel of the tournament was the official one with 16K viewers. The second spot went to the content creator /themg7 from Twitch: 8.4K viewers.

Realkey from Brazil became the most popular player. His card battles were watched by 28.9K Average Viewers. The second spot was taken by the Japanese player Yamato with 27.6K Average Viewers.

The most popular Legends of Runeterra events by Peak Viewers

However, this was not the most successful event for the discipline – that title goes to the Legends of Runeterra competition as part of the Twitch Rivals in 2020. At the time the game was still fresh, so the audience was largely driven by curiosity regarding the new title, while the streamers invited for the promo only fueled public interest in the broadcasts.

How does Legends of Runeterra compare to Hearthstone?

Hearthstone is already seven years old and the game has long jumped the shark. If we compare the HS World Championships over the 2016-2019 period, we will see that their performance is in a different league when compared to Legends of Runeterra. For example, the Hearthstone World Championship 2019 attracted 276K Peak Viewers.

At the same time, the discipline is currently losing viewers. Hearthstone World Championship 2020 was watched by 86K Peak Viewers, which is 86% less than in 2019. Nevertheless, this result is still twice as high as that of the Legends of Runeterra World Championship. It seems that the card game from Riot Games is yet to surpass its main competitor.

The Hearthstone World Championship 2021 has yet to take place, as the second season of the Grandmasters Premier League has yet to end. It is only after October that we will be able to find out more information about the holding of a new major event for the discipline – and eventually compare it with the Legends of Runeterra World Championship 2021 for a more reliable assessment.

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