RLCS 2024 World Championship sets viewership record in opening days despite audiences shrinking overall

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The RLCS 2024 - World Championship is the ultimate event of the year for Rocket League. Taking place in Forth Worth, United States, the event boasts a $1.16M prize pool and could be one of the most popular Rocket League tournaments ever. Despite promising conditions, the viewership for the opening days of the event have been disappointingly low, although there are still many matches to go.

The current landscape of Rocket League is ideal for breaking records; last year’s world championship became the most popular event ever for the esports title, and the RLCS 2024 - Major 1 event this year became the second-most-popular tournament ever for Rocket League. The major tournament reached its peak audience thanks to a French derby match featuring Gentle Mates Alpine and Karmine Corp. These two organizations have emerged as two of Rocket League’s favourite teams, and French fans for the esports title has quickly become the largest audience for the esport thanks to these teams and their owners’ co-casts. 

RLCS 2024 World Championship Opening Viewership

In total, the first two days of matches at the world championship received 1.6M Hours Watched. This viewership largely came from Twitch, which is normally the preferred platform for European and North American esports fans. The event was also covered on Kick and TikTok, but viewership from these platforms did not even manage to account for 0.5% of the event’s total watch time so far.

Straight away from the beginning of the 2024 world championship, French has overtaken English to become Rocket League’s most popular language. French was previously highly popular, but did not manage to overtake English by peak concurrent viewers on any day throughout the 2023 Word Championship. The source of the 2024 world championship’s peak viewership is clear, once again coming from French audiences hyping up French derby matches. 

Team Vitality’s match against Gentle Mates Alpine was the most popular game of the first couple of days, having reached 226K Peak Viewers. Team Vitality became the first organization to win two RLCS world championships last year, but the team failed to perform this year, and currently, hold a 1-2 record with 2 matches to go. If the team wants to continue through the tournament, they will need to win both of their remaining matches to qualify for the playoffs.

G2 Stride and Team Falcons have been the dominant forces of the groups so far, winning all three of their matches flawlessly to advance to the upper-bracket quarterfinals. Team Falcons finished 2nd at the RLCS 2024 - Major 2: London this year, as well as in 2nd place at the Esports World Cup 2024. The Saudi Arabian organization will be hoping to finally achieve a championship this year. 

Viewership comparison of opening days for Rocket League World Championships

Comparing the viewership for this year’s world championship to the past few years, there are clearly some oddities surrounding the 2024 statistics. Despite recording fewer Hours Watched and a lower Average Viewers figure than previous years, the 2024 world championship managed to record the highest peak viewership of any world championship’s opening days. This viewership record extends past the last two years, predating the RLCS and valid for the esports game’s entire history. 

This peak viewership came from the French derby, featuring Vitality and Gentle Mates. Critically, this viewership would not have been possible without Gotaga’s support, one of Gentle Mates’ co-owners. During Gentle Mate Alpine’s match against Vitality, Gotaga’s broadcast received 71.5K PV and became the most popular broadcast of the entire event so far. French language viewership is extremely powerful within Rocket League esports, and French co-streams featuring popular creators have become dominant forces for its viewership.

Despite the record-setting peak viewership achieved during the opening days, Average Viewers showed a distinct drop in attention from fans in 2024, and watch time fell by 2.3%, following the 5.7% drop the world championship suffered in 2023. In general, viewership and attention for the RLCS world championship did not grow during the first few days, even if viewership peaks are being fuelled by creators’ with millions of social media followers.

Viewership for the 2024 ultimate event has also been boosted by Twitch Drops integrations. Twitch Drops are a useful tool for event organizers to boost their viewership numbers, as players tune in to unlock certain items for Rocket League. However, according to Streams Charts’ data, only 21% of viewership for Rocket League on Twitch during opening days came from streams advertising Twitch Drops. This data is not precisely accurate, since it includes all Twitch broadcasts for Rocket League, but it still shows that community casters are more important for Rocket League viewership than Twitch Drops.

Most Popular Broadcasters of the RLCS 2024 World Championship

Looking towards the top broadcasters of the event so far, Gotaga and Kamet0 were the dominant community casters at the event, even outperforming the official Rocket League Twitch and YouTube channels.

Kamet0 is a founder of Karmine Corp, one of France’s most popular esports organizations. The streamer was supporting his team throughout their battles at the event, but with a 0-2 record, Kamet0 fans will likely be tuning in to see if his team can survive the groups. He reached 65.2K Peak Viewers for his stream on September 11. The broadcast was largely focused on League of Legends, but Kamet0 tuned in to his team’s match against FURIA for an hour. Streams Charts PRO users can see exactly how and when viewership grew during his broadcast by using the stream dynamics feature.

Aside from these popular content creators, the official English-language RocketLeague Twitch account was the most popular official broadcast for the event, having reached 64.5K Peak Viewers, but the French-language account was not far behind. RocketBaguette reached 37.6K Peak Viewers for the French broadcast, highlighting that this audience has a place outside of community caster channels. Finally, the English-language YouTube broadcast, Rocket League Esports, reached 19.1K PV.

In summary, viewership is looking to be on an overall downwards trend from the beginning of this year’s RLCS world championship. While watch time and average concurrent viewers are falling, the esports title is still able to set peak concurrent viewers records from time to time, depending on the powerful audience for certain content creators. The 2024 world championship may well be able to set a new viewership record for Rocket League esports, but this will be done from the shoulders of Kamet0 and Gotaga.