What are the reasons behind VCT Masters Copenhagen low viewership?

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VCT 2022: Stage 2 Masters Copenhagen showed the weakest viewership among all Masters tournaments. Earlier, we provided a detailed analysis of the results of this event, and in the new article, we will try to identify the reasons for the failure.

Fans of competitive shooters always like to compare CS:GO to Valorant. To begin with, it is worth mentioning the key differences between the disciplines in terms of viewership statistics: the CS:GO competitive scene has existed for many years and is self-sufficient in terms of attracting interest, while Valorant esports largely relies on the support of the top Twitch streamers.

Let's start with the fact that the number of Hours Watched the Masters series tournaments received from the community casters was comparable to the one generated by all the official broadcasts during the current VCT season. Obviously, independent streamers are incredibly important for maintaining the popularity of Valorant esports, because if it were not for their contribution, the tournament’s performance would twice lower.

Tarik became the most popular channel for coverage of VCT 2022: Stage 2 Masters Copenhagen by all major viewership indicators. The tournament broadcasts of the former pro CS:GO player attracted 187.8K Peak Viewers and more than 68.7K Average Viewers. Note that these figures also became record-breaking for the streamer's channel. The most successful community caster in Japanese was fps_shaka, in Spanish – mixwell, while coreano was the leader among the Portuguese-speaking creators.

Most popular VCT 2022 Stage 2 Masters channels

The Valorant channel on Twitch became the leader among the official broadcast channels of the tournament. It managed to gather 136.7K Peak Viewers and more than 49K Average Viewers. At the same time, the English-language YouTube channel of VALORANT Champions Tour became second by Peak Viewers Average Viewers.

In 2022, the broadcasts of VCT Masters generated a total of 60.5M Hours Watched. More than 45% of these were derived from English-language broadcasts, while Japanese contributed 24% and Portuguese contributed 13.5%.

Compared to the metrics of 2021, the indicator of English-language streams of VCT Masters decreased by 8%, while that of Japanese- and Portuguese-language streams grew by 9% and 5%. Also note that the YouTube-derived share of tournaments’ Hours Watched grew by 4% in 2022, while the share of Twitch decreased by 4%.

The official English-language stream of Masters that takes place on the Valorant Twitch channel is the main and most popular one, but its indicators have shown no growth since VCT 2021: Stage 3 Masters Berlin. The influence of other broadcast languages on the overall tournament statistics is not very stable and depends mainly on the success of the local teams in terms of the spots taken.

For example, the popularity of the official streams in Japanese and Portuguese was the highest during VCT 2022: Stage 1 Masters Reykjavík, where ZETA DIVISION and LOUD made it to the top 3. At the same time, at VCT 2022: Stage 2 Masters Copenhagen, the representatives of Japan and Brazil dropped out of the tournament almost at the very beginning of the event, which also had a rather strong impact on the final statistics.

FunPlus Phoenix and Paper Rex met in the grand final of VCT 2022: Stage 2 Masters Copenhagen.The Singaporean team was very popular with the audience of the event, while the European team attracted much less attention. If someone like OpTic Gaming had played in the decisive match instead of FPX, then the tournament’s Peak Viewers indicator would certainly have been higher. The absence of precisely two very popular teams in the grand final is another reason for the event’s failure in terms of viewership statistics.

IEM Cologne 2022 took place almost simultaneously with VCT 2022: Stage 2 Masters Copenhagen. We analyzed the audience of these tournaments and found that approximately 25% of the English-speaking and Portuguese-speaking VCT viewers also followed the CS:GO championship when both events were live during the same days.

It is worth saying that, unlike Valorant, the tournaments dedicated to the shooter from Valve do not really depend on the casting community and are able to attract a huge audience through official broadcasts alone.

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The poor viewership results of VCT 2022: Stage 2 Masters Copenhagen may prompt the developers of Valorant to think about the need for changes. There is nothing wrong with the fact that the Valorant esports audience is supported by independent streamers. Riot Games can build on this and bring even more popular creators into covering the tournament by partnering with them or even inviting them as guests on official broadcasts. In addition, the popularity of official Valorant broadcasts can always be increased with the help of various in-game bonuses issued to viewers for spectating.