MSI 2024 set new viewership records for the series — Korean language outperforms English, YouTube gets more viewers than Twitch

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The first international tournament of the League of Legends season, the Mid-Season Invitational 2024, has concluded. The grand finals once again featured teams from South Korea and China, delivering an engaging showdown across four games. The tournament set several new viewership records and reaffirmed the growing importance of community casting.

The Play-In Stage of MSI 2024 proceeded as expected, but the Bracket Stage was filled with thrilling matches. Notably, T1 faced G2 Esports twice, defeating the LEC champions both times. Meanwhile, Bilibili Gaming also bested T1 twice, with their final clash in the lower bracket being particularly exciting: Faker's team was on the brink of reaching the grand final, but an outstanding performance by Chinese toplaner Bin ended their hopes.

In the final series, Gen.G faced Bilibili Gaming and emerged victorious with a 3-1 score. Each game in the finals was highly intense, with the last game lasting 47 minutes, making it the longest game of the entire tournament.

The Mid-Season Invitational 2024 continued the series' tradition of breaking peak viewership records each year. Over the past weekend, the tournament attracted more than 2.82 million Peak Viewers, making MSI 2024 the sixth most popular tournament in the game's history. Notably, this new record was set not during the grand finals, but in the lower bracket final between Bilibili Gaming and T1.

MSI 2024 also set a new record for total watch time, becoming the first tournament in the series to average over a million concurrent viewers per broadcast. Less than ten tournaments have achieved such a milestone in the history of esports: among extended events lasting more than 24 hours, MSI 2024 ranks fifth.

The most popular tournaments in Esports by Average Viewers (airtime 24h+ events only)

Korean has always been one of the main broadcast languages in the international series, but MSI 2024 marked the first time it surpassed English. Korean viewership outperformed English in all metrics, including total watch time, average viewership, and peak viewership. Compared to MSI 2023, the share of Korean viewership increased from 19.5% to 25.6%. Several factors contributed to this growth, such as the strong performance of Korean teams and favorable time zones.

Four out of the top five most popular matches of the tournament featured T1. Although Faker's team did not reach the finals, they led in total Hours Watched and average viewership.

Regarding other languages, the shares of English and Spanish viewership remained almost unchanged compared to MSI 2023. However, the share of Portuguese viewership dropped from 10.4% to 4.4%. This decline was due to the poor performance of LOUD, the sole representative from Brazil in the tournament. The match between LOUD and GAM Esports drew the most viewers for the Portuguese broadcast, peaking at 374.8K viewers. In comparison, the grand finals peaked at 278K viewers on Portuguese broadcasts.

Vietnamese viewership saw significant growth at MSI 2024, rising from 15.4% to nearly 20%. Unlike Brazilian viewers, Vietnamese fans closely followed matches featuring T1. Additionally, the Tagalog language set a new record in League of Legends with 65.9K Peak Viewers, surpassing the previous high of 3.5K during Worlds 2021.YouTube became the main streaming platform for MSI 2024, surpassing Twitch in both total watch time and concurrent viewership. The last time this happened was during MSI 2019 in Vietnam/Taiwan. Several factors contributed to this shift. Firstly, the tournament's location in China attracted more Asian viewers, who prefer YouTube over Twitch. Secondly, Twitch's shutdown in South Korea led many Korean community casters to switch to other platforms like CHZZK and YouTube. Consequently, AfreecaTV's share dropped from 8.4% last year to 6.6%, highlighting the migration of the Korean audience. Clearly, YouTube has become the main beneficiary of Twitch's exit from South Korea in the context of LoL esports.

MSI 2024 also set a new record for TikTok in League of Legends, with a peak of 77.7K viewers, almost all on the Vietnamese channel vcslmht. The previous record for the platform was 61.5K during LCK Spring 2024.

The success of MSI 2024 in terms of viewership owes much to community casting. This year, the tournament was covered by 141 unique channels, a significant increase from the 96 channels of the previous year.

One standout performer was British streamer Caedrel, whose broadcasts attracted 2.5 times more viewership hours compared to the previous tournament. During MSI 2024, Caedrel set a personal peak viewership record with over 211.5K viewers. His channel emerged as the most popular English-language stream for MSI 2024, surpassing even the official riotgames channel, which was dethroned from its usual top position.

Alongside Caedrel, other notable streamers also contributed to record-breaking numbers of MSI 2024. Ibai and Tolkin saw increases in their viewership hours compared to last year, while popular French streamer Kamet0 joined the coverage for the first time. IWDominate expanded his audience reach by streaming simultaneously on both Twitch and YouTube. Despite a slight decline in viewership metrics, Brazilian streamer Baiano reached the milestone of one million Twitch followers during the tournament.

We'll delve deeper into the role of community casting in MSI 2024 and its impact on the game in an upcoming article. Keep an eye out for more updates!