T1 dethroned from their usual spot as most popular team in Worlds 2023 Group Stage

The Knockout Stage of Worlds 2023 begins tomorrow, November 2, with the Quarterfinals match between NRG and Weibo Gaming. Before we turn our attention to the playoffs of the League of Legends World Championship, let's take a look back at the Group Stage of the event to see which teams were the most popular. Of the 16 teams to compete through the Swiss Group of the event, Gen.G reigned supreme with 1.42M Average Viewers across their three matches. The Korean roster was able to take the top spot of the event partially thanks to the interesting and eye-catching matches they played. Gen.G advanced through the Swiss stage with a flawless 3-0 recording, beating GAM Esports, T1, and G2 Esports. GAM Esports was the sole representative of Vietnam in the Group Stage, and the combined viewership of Korean and Vietnamese audiences made the match hugely popular. T1 set the highest Peak Viewers in esports ever recorded last year, receiving 5.17M PV at Worlds 2022. They command a huge following around the world and bring fans from all corners of the globe. The Korean derby between T1 and Gen.G was the second-most-popular match of the entire Group stage, drawing in 1.84M Peak Viewers. Finally, G2 Esports is the #1 ranked team from the EMEA region, and their match against Gen.G was widely watched by European audiences. In summary, Gen.G played three teams that all commanded significant audiences from around the world, leading to them becoming the most popular team of the stage. Most popular teams of Worlds 2023 Group Stage T1 was close behind Gen.G, receiving less than 10K fewer Average Viewers. T1 is a hugely popular esports brand name, and some of their matches were the most popular games of the main event. However, their matches against North American rosters struggled to maintain the high viewership that T1 expects. T1’s Round 1 match against Team Liquid and Round 3 match against Cloud9 received extremely low viewership by T1 standards, even though the match against Team Liquid still ranked within the top 10 most popular matches by Average Viewers. Their low viewership in these matches was a key reason for them losing out to Gen.G in this ranking. The third-most-popular team of the Group Stage was Bilibili Gaming, who received 1.39M Average Viewers across their five games. Bilibili Gaming is the only team within this top three ranking to have played the maximum of five games during the Swiss Stage; Gen.G played three and T1 played four. Bilibili Gaming managed to rank third in this ranking, despite viewership statistics on Chinese live-streaming platforms being ineligible for consideration. Bilibili likely received significant viewership on these platforms as Chinese nationals happily supported their local teams in the event, but Chinese live-streaming platforms’ viewership statistics are unreliable and cannot be considered here. With this in mind, the fact that Bilibili Gaming managed to rank third with 1.39M Average Viewers is even more impressive. Although Vietnamese was consistently one of the three most popular languages of the event, this popularity was not reflected in GAM Esports’ Average Viewers. Vietnamese viewership rose when GAM Esports was playing, but the team struggled to compete with other popular teams at the event in Average Viewers, perhaps due to poor performance in matches. GAM Esports was one of the least popular teams at the event, drawing only 1.04M Average Viewers across their games. North American teams were on average the worst-performing teams of the event in terms of Average Viewers. Although English is often the most popular language for matches at Worlds, this viewership went to other teams and not the North American rosters. This poor viewership performance cannot be chalked up to poor performance in-game, as NRG have qualified for playoffs but still exhibits low Average Viewers. Cloud9 are the only team at Worlds 2023 to have recorded fewer than 1M Average Viewers in the Group Stage. Of the top 5 most popular teams at the Worlds 2023 Group Stage, Team BDS is the only team to have been eliminated already. Team BDS managed to rank within the top 5 most popular teams, with 1.17M Average Viewers despite an early exit from the event. Although Team BDS went 0-3 at Worlds, they still managed to draw in a crowd for their games.

T1 dethroned from their usual spot as most popular team in Worlds 2023 Group Stage

Detailed Esports data at your fingertips.

Newsfeed

Read also

Esports Charts