Red Bull Home Ground 3: set a series record for viewership

Red Bull Home Ground #3, the Valorant tournament, took place in Manchester from December 9 to 11. The event has reached the biggest viewership in the series, gathering a record number of spectators at the screens. Read the Esports Charts review for more details.

Red Bull Home Ground #3 is one of eight 2022/2023 off-season tournaments for EMEA sponsored by Riot Games. All of these tournaments are run by different companies, but with the direct participation of the game's developers. The event by Red Bull is the largest championship in terms of prize pool as the participants played for a share of $100K.

Red Bull Home Ground #3 featured eight teams in total, seven invited teams, as well as the FUT Esports team, which won the Turkish qualifier. Viewers had the opportunity to see Riot Games' regional league affiliate teams updated lineups in action. The teams such as Team Liquid, Team Vitality, Team Heretics, Cloud9 and several others changed their rosters significantly during the off-season, so the Red Bull tournament was a good opportunity for them to prove themselves.

100 Thieves players with the trophy on stage at Victoria Warehouse / Photo: twitter.com/RedBullUK

Red Bull Home Ground #3 had two stages, namely the Group Stage and the Playoffs. 100 Thieves was victorious, defeating Cloud9 3-0 in the Grand Final.

Viewership Statistics

Red Bull Home Ground #3 matches accumulated 1.8 million Hours Watched in 26 hours of Airtime. The broadcasts had 71.6K Average Viewers. The Peak Viewers number was 131.2K people at the Grand Final between Cloud9 and 100 Thieves. It is interesting that the second most popular match (Cloud9 vs. KRU on the final day of the tournament) had 39% fewer Peak Viewers.

Red Bull Home Ground #3 viewership statistics

The 100 Thieves matches had the most Hours Watched, 533K. Both finalists had about the same number of Average Viewers at their matches, about 90K.

English became the most popular language of Red Bull Home Ground #3 broadcasts — it accounted for almost 50% of the total Hours Watched. Broadcasts in Spanish (18.6%) and German (14.8%) are also in the Top 3. Portuguese, Turkish and Russian accounted for 4-5% each. As for the audience distribution by platform, Twitch accounted for 96.7% of total Hours Watched. The rest of the total was accounted for by YouTube.

Comparison with Other Tournaments in the Series

Red Bull Home Ground #3 has become the most popular tournament in the series by all major metrics. It outpaced Red Bull Home Ground #2 almost three times by Average Viewers, and more than twice by Peak Viewers. There were several reasons for this progress, but the main one was the increase in the number of channels on which the matches were broadcast. There were only 26 channels during the second tournament, while the third one had 45 channels. Moreover, Red Bull Home Ground #3 had a more active community casting with the top Twitch streamers: Mixwell, iTzTimmy, eliasn97, fps_shaka and others: a large number of viewers watched their channels.

In addition to esports tournaments, Red Bull also holds other events. For example, the freestyle rap battle called Internacional Red Bull Batalla ended recently. It featured 16 of the best improvisers from Latin America and Spain. You can read more about it here. The statistics on other Red Bull events can be found on this page.

The VCT 2023: LOCK//IN São Paulo tournament is scheduled for February 13 to March 4 in São Paulo, with all 30 Riot Games regional leagues partner teams playing there. The leagues themselves take place from March 26 to May 28 in Berlin, Seoul and Los Angeles.