Acend Triumph and New Record in the Discipline — Valorant Champions 2021 Statistical Overview
Valorant's debut esports season is over! The main tournament in the discipline — Valorant Champions 2021 — ended on Sunday. European team Acend defeated the CIS stars Gambit Esports in the final after a comeback from a 1:2 score. The decisive match of the tournament turned out to be a record for the discipline: it attracted several thousand more spectators than the final of Reykjavík Masters. Esports Charts breaks down the viewership statistics of the event.
Valorant Champions 2021 General Statistics
Disclaimer: data doesn’t include statistics from Chinese streaming platforms as they use different methods to calculate viewership activity
The Valorant Champions matches were streamed for 98 hours; this is the second longest tournament in the discipline (only the Skyesports League 2021 was longer on air). The average audience of the event was 469K viewers, and the championship collected a record 46M Hours Watched in total, which is 37% more than at VCT 2021: Stage 3 Masters Berlin.
At its peak, the final of the tournament attracted 1.089M people, which is also a new record for the discipline. Previously, the first place was held by the debut international championship in the Masters series: back then the final between Fnatic and Sentinels was simultaneously watched by 1.085 million viewers.
In addition to the decisive match of the event, a semifinal between Gambit and KRÜ Esports also attracted a million spectators. Sergio Aguero's team turned out to be one of the most popular in the tournament: its games against Sentinels and Fnatic also got into the top 5 matches of the event in terms of audience.
Most Popular Teams
Gambit Esports became the most watched team tournament with an average audience of 647K spectators. This is 5.7% more than the Sentinels had, which came second by this metric. It is noteworthy that the first place went to a team from the CIS where Valorant is not very popular with viewers: the Russian-language broadcast of the tournament gathered only 20K viewers at its peak.
In third place was KRÜ, which was actively followed by a Spanish-speaking audience. During the semifinals between KRÜ and Gambit, Spanish-language broadcasts at their peak attracted over 421K viewers; this is the second result among languages after English (600K Peak Viewers).
Acend and FURIA Esports rounded out the top five. It is noteworthy that the Brazilian team is the only one in the top that did not make it to the playoffs. The squad played only two matches at the tournament and lost both of them, finishing last in Group B.
Languages Statistics
Valorant Champions 2021 has been streamed in over 20 languages. English became the leader in terms of Hours Watched, it accounted for almost 50% of the total. Japanese is in second place with 13.9%, and the top 5 also includes Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish.
Interestingly, only Spanish has set new records for peak viewership among the top 5 languages of Valorant Champions. This was largely due to the active community casting: the KRÜ matches were covered by the owner of the team Sergio Aguero, as well as highly popular Spanish streamers ibai and TheGrefg.
Platforms Statistics
Twitch became main broadcasting platform for Valorant Champions, accounting for over 86% of the total. YouTube is in second place with 12.8%. Broadcasts were also conducted on Facebook, Trovo, Afreeca TV and VK Live, but even combined they managed to collect less than 1% of the total.
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Riot Games shared details about Valorant's next esports season shortly before the tournament final. Among the main changes are new regional leagues and reschedule of the Valorant Champions 2022 from December to September. The publisher also announced that they will increase the number of tournaments held by third-party organizers, and they will also continue to develop the female and amateur gaming scene. In short, there is no doubt that the future is bright for Valorant!
Extended data on the event is available to our PRO subscribers. Esports Charts can also provide full access to any tournament stats in the dashboard; it can be ordered directly from our sales team.
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