Shibuya HAL’s Valorant collaboration was one of the game's most popular third-party events this year

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Shibuya HAL, a Japanese VTuber who goes by 渋谷ハル on YouTube, recently held a collaborative Valorant tournament. Not only did the creator directly collaborate with the Valorant team to host their celebration of Valorant’s release on consoles, but he also invited other Japanese livestreamers and VTubers. Putting the full power of the Japanese audience for Valorant to use, the event became one of the most popular third-party Valorant events of the year. 

The event featured a team entirely consisting of NIJISANJI-affiliated VTubers, another team with multiplie hololive creators, and even some members of esports organizations such as Crazy Raccoon and ZETA DIVISION. Critically, not all of these creators involved with the event broadcasted the tournament to their channels. For example, Kuzuha Channel livestreamed the official announcement for the event and reached 27.5K Peak Viewers, but he did not broadcast the actual event itself.

Read more on Streams Charts: 150,000 live viewers tuned in to reveal of Shibuya HAL x Valorant tournament, a collaboration of Riot Games and Japanese streamers

In total, the short one-day event generated 518.8K Hours Watched and maintained an average viewership of 73.2K concurrent fans. For comparison, this one-off event reached a higher average viewership than the VALORANT Challengers Japan 2024: Split 1 event, which became the most popular Valorant Challengers event ever.

Although highly popular with 96.2K Peak Viewers recorded, this was not the most popular third-party Valorant event of the year. That honour goes to the Valorant Eligella Cup May, an event hosted by eliasn97, one of Germany’s most popular livestreamers who is known especially for his special events. The event reached 128.7K Peak Viewers, and made the most of the German livestreaming community. Elias invited many of Germany’s leading creators, and the event was broadcasted by well over 40+ Twitch channels, reaching all corners of the German-speaking online sphere. 

The Japanese audience for Valorant is clearly one of the strongest regional audiences for the esports game. Even outside competitive tournament settings, Valorant competitions are able to reach a massive viewership with the power of content creators and streamers. However, this isn’t to say the tournament wasn’t competitive. Each of the four teams had a dedicated coach, and met together before the event for scrims, or practice games. 

The grand final of the event saw fps_shaka’s team face off against the NIJISANJI roster, featuring Kuzuha, 渡会雲雀 / Watarai Hibari, 三枝明那 / Saegusa Akina, and other NIJISANJI-signed VTubers. After suffering a defeat in the first map of the best of three series, fps_shaka’s team managed to turn the tide for a strong 2-1 victory. Not only the champion of the event, fps_shaka was also the ultimate streamer of the event, reaching 43K Peak Viewers on his Twitch channel for the tournament.

Aside from the champion, Karubi Akami (赤見かるび) was the next-most popular player of the event, having reached 10K PV; her team’s coach, clutch_fii, also reached 11.8K Peak Viewers for his perspective of the action. Although the event was highly popular, the tournament left a lot on the table. Many of the tournament’s popular VTubers and streamers did not stream during the matches, and the event was only covered by 13 channels across both YouTube and Twitch. If more of the creators competing had also streamed their view, the viewership for the tournament would have likely been much, much higher.

Valorant’s Japanese audiences continues to cement themselves as not only one of the most passionate, but also one of the most sizable regional audiences for the game. The recent Valorant Challenger Japan events this year are by far the most popular Challenger events ever, and the viewership for Shibuya HAL’s crossover event with Valorant showed a more casual side of Japan’s Valorant community.