Valorant 2025 Kickoff viewership results: regional distribution flattened, EMEA catching Pacific

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Earlier this month, the regional Kickoff tournaments for each International League (IL) of the Valorant Champions Tour finished up. While the order of each region in terms of watch time remains the same — Americas, Pacific, EMEA, China — the viewership spread of regions has narrowed significantly, and EMEA is on its way to overtaking the Pacific league for second place.

Esports Charts now presents the viewership statistics for each region and will examine the viewership trends, year-on-year shifts, and changes in the Valorant esports broadcasting scene. It is important to note our viewership statistics cannot include data from Chinese livestreaming platforms, due to the unreliability of the available statistics.

Valorant Champions Tour 2025 Kickoff viewership

  VCT 2025 Kickoffs viewership results   

Across the four International Leagues in Valorant’s top-tier, VCT 2025: Americas Kickoff remains its most-watched and most popular scene. For 2025, the circuit received 17.19M Hours Watched and recorded over half-a-million concurrent viewers. We examined these statistics more thoroughly in our recap piece for this specific region.

Crucially, the peak viewership, while still impressive at over 550,000 viewers, marked a downturn from last year’s record-setting event. The 2024 Americas Kickoff became Valorant’s most popular regional tournament ever, with over 820,000 concurrent viewers. Generally, viewership in Valorant flattened out this year, with a less extreme spread of watch time across the ILs.

Read also: VCT Americas concludes 2025 Kickoff events as most popular Valorant International League

Although the VCT 2025: Pacific Kickoff came out ahead of the VCT 2025: EMEA Kickoff this year, the running was closer than last year. While both ILs benefited from fan followings for specific teams and players to reach their peaks, EMEA showed a healthier average concurrent viewership throughout the Kickoff. Compared to 2024, when Pacific led EMEA by roughly 75,000 viewers, the competition is tightening up. 

Interestingly, the peak viewerships for both Pacific and EMEA were reached outside its playoffs games. In Asia, the Pacific’s peak was reached thanks to massive Japanese support for local team DetonatioN FocusMe, and meanwhile, the EMEA circuit benefitted massively from the debut of Ava “florescent” Eugene, the first alumnus of Game Changers to compete in the VCT. 

Across in the VCT 2025: China Kickoff, the newest IL, the league is slowly finding its feet and receiving viewership outside Chinese livestreaming platforms. Both Chinese and English-language broadcasts are receiving promising viewership following EDward Gaming claiming the Valorant Champions title last year. A Chinese team winning it all may have raised awareness and interest in the VCT China.

Valorant Champions Tour 2025 Kickoff year-on-year result

  VCT 2025 & 2024 Kickoffs watch time comparison   

Compared to last year, regional circuits recorded a lower watch time, except for EMEA and the new China circuit. EMEA has often fielded some of the VCT’s top teams, but viewership for the league overall has not been that strong. 2025 marked the VCT EMEA receiving large viewership from core English, Spanish, and French-speaking audiences, as well as activating other minor audiences like Turkish and Portuguese-speaking fans. If the IL can continue to engage these many fan groups, Valorant in EMEA could grow to outpace the Pacific region.

As we observed in our VCT Americas Kickoff article recently, interest in Valorant has fallen from its massive peaks of 2024. Viewership for the Americas circuit fell significantly for both English co-casters and official broadcasters, with all major metrics showing a decline. However, the Latin American community has upheld its passion from last year, and now stands as the larger audience of the Americas. Together, Spanish and Portuguese-speaking viewers outweighed English-speaking ones for the Americas Kickoff this year.

In the Pacific Kickoff, we noted similar trends among language demographics. While leading audiences like Japanese and English-speaking fans lost viewers this year, smaller regional audiences such as Thai and Indonesian fans maintained their position, Korean viewers doubled their size compared to 2024. Dissimilar to the VCT America, which collects viewership from three, arguably two, main demographics, the Pacific region is coming in line with EMEA, which collects viewership from a wider spread of major and minor groups.

Japanese-language viewership remained the driving force of the VCT Pacific, but it may be losing its grip. Korean Valorant organizations like T1, Gen.G, and DRX are absolutely the dominant forces of the VCT Pacific at the moment, and Korean viewership is exploding as these teams continue to display the top-level talent of their IL. 

Next week, on February 20, VCT 2025: Masters Bangkok begins, the first Masters event of the year. While popular fan favorite Sentinels qualifying is a good omen for viewership, no LATAM team will be in attendance of the event, likely leading to low Spanish and Portuguese-language viewership. Similarly in both EMEA and the Pacific, popular teams like DetonatioN FocusMe, Paper Rex, Gentle Mates, and Apeks have not qualified for Masters Bangkok.

Qualified teams for VCT 2025: Masters Bangkok

As one of esports’ newest industry-leading esports titles, Valorant is still settling into esports broadcasting. The audiences and trends for Valorant’s esports livestreaming are constantly changing, with multiple passionate regional audiences all competing to cheer on their favorite teams. As it stands, 2025 is primed for Valorant to solidify its viewership and tap into previously minor audiences.