How Masters Madrid became the most popular Valorant tournament ever
It’s no secret that at the recent VCT 2024 Masters Madrid event a new viewership record was reached for Valorant. The grand final between Sentinels and Gen.G went down to the wire in the 5th map of their best-of-5, and ultimately, the Americas-based team took home their first international LAN win in almost 3 years.
Valorant is off to a roaring start for 2024. The Kickoff events around the globe garnered extremely high viewership, with Japanese audiences boosting the Pacific viewership, new fan-favourite teams emerging in EMEA, and the Americas reaching over 800K concurrent viewers. With Masters Madrid behind us and a new viewership record for the discipline set, Valorant is poised to expand its reach throughout the esports scene and become even more popular than ever before.
Masters Madrid did not only set a peak viewership record but showed strong increases across various metrics, and by looking deeper at these dynamics and changes, we can understand how exactly the Valorant scene is evolving and growing.
VCT 2024 Masters Madrid viewership statistics
The Masters Madrid event set a new peak viewership record with 1.69M Peak Viewers, as you likely already know, marking a 103.3% increase compared to VCT 2023 Masters Tokyo. The game was undoubtedly boosted by Sentinels’ popularity in North America; all of the event’s top 5 most popular matches featured the Sentinels team. However, the 671.6K Average Viewers also marked a 95% increase, proving the event’s viewership was up across the board, not only for matches where Sentinels took part.
In total, the tournament garnered 34.92M Hours Watched, denoting a smaller increase of 22.9%, but the event was also 37% shorter than the previous Masters Tokyo event. A key part of Valorant’s viewership has historically been community casters, and the recent Madrid event was no different. Last year’s Tokyo event was broadcast by over 200 channels, but the Masters Madrid was live on well over 300+ individual live streaming channels.
Of course, no matter how many channels go live, tarik remains the king of Valorant viewership. The Turkish-American streamer is often the most popular broadcasting option for fans; tarik was the most popular Twitch streamer to cover the event, having reached 313.5K Peak Viewers for the grand finals match. The official English-language Valorant Champions Tour channel was the most popular YouTube-based broadcast, with 237.8K PV recorded.
Generally speaking, Twitch was the most popular option for community casters. Twitch as a platform recorded over 1.16M Peak Viewers for the event’s grand finals, thanks to a staggering 97.4% increase in peak viewership compared to last year’s Masters Tokyo event. This was also the first Valorant event to be streamed on CHZZK, a new South Korean platform which has emerged to fill the market gap left behind by Twitch’s exit from the country.
Many South Korean streamers cheered on Gen.G from the platform, and it far outperformed other South Korean platforms such as Afreeca TV. Compared to Masters Tokyo, Korean-language average viewership increased by 117.5%. European languages, Spanish and French, were also critical for the event’s viewership and saw significant growth compared to last year. This is thanks to the emergence of Karmine Corp and Team Heretics as the leading teams of the EMEA region, both of which have strong ties to France and Spain, respectively.
The VCT 2024 Masters Madrid became Valorant’s most popular tournament by peak concurrent viewership thanks to a myriad of reasons. The scene has been shaken up this year, with Gen.G emerging from Pacific as a strong international contender, and Karmine Corp and Team Heretics jumping to the front of EMEA. All of these teams bring strong national audiences with them, which will continue to build and increase viewership for Valorant events throughout this year if the teams can qualify.
Valorant has also been receiving more attention from community casters. The Masters Madrid event was covered by more channels than last year’s Valorant Champions event, and as 2024 heads towards its more prestigious events later in the calendar, this will likely only increase. Valorant has a bright future ahead of it; the game is relatively new to the esports scene and as the esports ecosystem of the game matures and develops, its viewership only seems to grow.
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