Valorant Champions 2023 Day 1 viewership statistics

The Valorant Champions Tour is coming to an end for the 2023 season with the ultimate event of the year, the Valorant Champions 2023. The event marks the end of Valorant’s first franchised season and will see 16 teams from regions across the globe compete for $2,225,000 USD, the largest prize pool for a single tournament in Valorant history.

The event started on the 6th of August and although only four teams have played so far, Esports Charts already have the data for the games. Sadly for Valorant, just as the Masters Tokyo event drew in less viewership than LOCK//IN São Paulo, the downturn is continuing for the discipline.

Valorant Champions 2023 first-day viewership

The event kicked off with the Group D matches for the event. The group features household esports names like Team Liquid and NAVI and smaller but fan-favourite organisations. DRX and LOUD are two of the most popular teams in the discipline. DRX is a Korean roster which finished 3rd at last year’s Valorant Champions event and their first match was against LOUD, the current reigning champions of the 2022 season.

The Day 1 statistics for the event show that the match between DRX and LOUD was the more popular of the two, reaching 662.6K Peak Viewers during the best-of-three match. Although Team Liquid and NAVI are both famous names in esports, these teams both come from the EMEA region. The LOUD vs DRX game may have benefited in viewership from the fact that these teams come from two separate regions, the Americas and Pacific region, respectively. Combining the viewership of both of their passionate regions, DRX and LOUD were the more popular teams of the Day 1 matches. Viewership comparison for Day 1 between Valorant Champions 2023 and 2022

Although 662K concurrent viewers is an achievement to be proud of for any esports, it marks a downturn in viewership compared to the Valorant Champions 2022 event. Both tournaments featured the same Day 1 schedule, with two matches being played, but the 2022 event outperformed its 2023 peer for both matches. At the 2022 event, the first day reached its peak viewership during the match between Paper Rex and EDward Gaming, which received 860K Peak Viewers.

On paper, one might expect the 2023 event to receive more viewership due to the hype of the matches on display. The 2022 event opened with the Chinese EDward Gaming playing against APAC #1 Paper Rex; LATAM Leviatán also faced off against European Team Liquid. Although these matches do draw in a solid mixture of viewership from around the globe, the 2023 match of reigning champions LOUD against Korean fan-favourites DRX should on paper have been an amazing match to open the event with.

Watch time was also down, despite the 2023 event being live for almost an hour longer than the previous event. Valorant Champions 2023 accumulated 3.68M Hours Watched during its run-time, which yet again marks a 16.7% decrease in viewership compared to the watch time of the 2022 event. Although it's too early to make any definitive comments about the tournament's viewership, it isn’t a good start for the event.

Viewership by language

English was the most popular language of the event, a little surprise as the main official broadcast is in English. However, Asian languages also received significant viewership. Due to the multinational nature of the Pacific teams that qualified for the event, you can expect to see a healthy spread of different Asian languages contributing to watch time throughout the event.

In terms of most popular languages per Peak Viewers share, Portuguese was accountable for the second-largest percentage of Peak Viewers, with 214.7K LOUD fans tuning in to support their reigning champions. However, considering LOUD’s defeat to DRX in the Group Stages, Portuguese-speaking viewership may taper off if the team is eliminated from the event. Although Korean wasn't one of the most popular languages of the event, it did grow in viewership thanks to DRX's appearance. Korean viewership totalled 54K hours of watch time, which is an 87.1% increase compared to last year.

Interestingly, another European language contributed a surprising amount of viewership and made it into the top three, despite only one player from a region that speaks this language playing during the first day of matches.

Most popular streams of the event

Turning to the most popular streams for the first day of the event, tarik was the most-watched channel to cover the matches. Tarik continues to fuel the trend of community casters taking over esports, with many fans preferring the laid-back and personality-focused nature of watch parties and community casters. Whether tarik for Valorant, Nix for Dota 2, or scump for Call of Duty, community casters are revolutionising the way fans watch esports events.

Of course, as you’d expect the official Valorant broadcasts of the events were also popular with fans. However, the performance of the different broadcasts may surprise you. Brazilian broadcasts ranked third by Watch Time and Peak Viewers, highlighting not only exactly how one of the major languages of the events received the viewership it did, but also the community support behind these teams.

Comparing these channels to the top channels of the 2022 event, tarik moved up to first from second place last year. The Turkish-American streamer received 48.3K more Hours Watched than last year, but just under 10K fewer peak concurrent viewers. The official Valorant channels suffered in comparison: not only did the English-speaking main broadcast channel lose viewership, but the Japanese Valorant broadcasts lost a huge amount of viewership. In 2022, the YouTube and Twitch broadcasts in Japanese were some of the most popular channels of the event, despite no Japanese teams playing on the first day of the event.

Valorant Champions 2023 is off to a rough start. Viewership is up compared to other events for the year, but this should be expected as the ultimate event of the season is the most prestigious event of the year. Compared to the 2022 Champions tournament, the 2023 event struggled to draw in the same viewership and suffered in all metrics. The night is still young and as the event progresses viewership may evolve and improve. Ultimately, the Valorant Champions 2023 event needs a playoffs stage that blows fans away and forces them to tune in to compete with previous events.

Esports Charts will continue to cover the viewership for the Valorant Champions 2023, so keep an eye out for more statistics and analysis of the event’s performance. Want to keep up on the viewership yourself as the event continues? Visit our tournament page for the event and stay up to date as we continue to track the data for all matches.