LPL Spring 2022: Viewership Stats and Tournament Results

LPL Spring 2022, the longest of League of Legends spring splits 2022, ended last weekend. Besides the failure of EDward Gaming and Royal Never Give Up champion's title, the tournament will be remembered by the discipline's fans for a number of problems and scandals. Esports Charts sums up the results of the championship and tells about its viewership statistics.

LPL Spring 2022 Results

The League of Legends esports season kicked off in China on January 10. LPL is the largest league by the number of teams as it lists seventeen rosters, including reigning world champion EDward Gaming. The teams competed for a prize pool of ¥4.2 million (a little over $651K) and a slot in MSI 2022.

The LPL Spring 2022 group stage ran until the end of March, and the Top 10 teams from the regular season qualified for the playoffs. Due to the uncommon format of the decisive stage, the top two teams in the groups only had to win three matches in a row to become champions. And Royal Never Give Up, which placed second in the group stage with a 12:4 score, took their chance.

In the playoffs, RNG first defeated JD Gaming (3:2) and then defeated Top Esports twice (3:1 in the Winners’ Final and 3:2 in the Grand Final). Thus, the MSI 2021 champions won their fifth national title in the team' history and will now play in the upcoming MSI 2022 — they will be the only team to play in the tournament remotely. Riot Games made an exception for RNG because of the rampant coronavirus in China.

The coronavirus has severely disrupted the plans of the LPL organizers. The playoff matches were postponed several times and the final was held online. But COVID-19 was not the only problem of the event: in early April it was revealed that LGD Gaming mid-laner Chen Jay Bo was involved in rigged matches. LGD avoided punishment, but Jay received a lifetime ban in League of Legends.

Tournament Viewership Statistics

Disclaimer: statistics doesn't include Chinese streaming services due to the unreliability of the data they provide.

LPL Spring 2022 became the longest event among the spring splits by total airtime — almost 400 hours. In that time, matches of the event accumulated more than 15.4 million Hours Watched on streaming platforms, and attracted 38.7K Average Viewers.

The most popular match of the tournament was the Grand Final between Royal Never Give Up and Top Esports — more than 200 Peak Viewers. It should be noted that the Top 5 games of the event also included the match of these teams in the Winners’ Finals, as well as three games of Weibo Gaming, including two against EDward Gaming. The latter can hardly take credit for the tournament: the champions of Summer Split 2021 and the World Championship finished LPL Spring 2022 on only 7th-8th place.

It should be noted that the champions of the spring split ranked among the Top 5 most popular teams of the event by Hours Watched and Average Viewers, but did not become the leaders by any of the metrics.

Stats on the most popular teams of the event are available with PRO subscription.

Excluding Chinese streaming platforms, English proved to be the main LPL broadcasting language, accounting for over 80% of Hours Watched. Other successful broadcasting languages also include Vietnamese and Korean. Among the platforms, Twitch accounted for nearly 60% of the total HW, and YouTube accounted for 37%.

Given the duration of the league, LPL ranked in the Top 5 of LoL spring splits by total Hours Watched. However, it falls far behind LCK and LEC, which rank first and second by this metric, respectively.

LPL is behind all the other major leagues, as well as the regional European championships in France and Spain by Peak Viewers. But it should be kept in mind that the LFL and LVP statistics were strongly influenced by the community casting, as these events were covered by Kamet0 and Ibai, respectively.