Valorant Champions 2023 final drew fewer viewers than last year
The new Valorant world champion was determined on the night of August 27. North American team Evil Geniuses claimed the crown of the main tournament of the current season, defeating the Paper Rex from Indonesia. The final match of Valorant Champions 2023 gathered an audience exactly in the range that we expected, and unfortunately, the event turned out to be less popular than both last year’s edition and VCT 2023 LOCK//IN.
The finalists of the event, Evil Geniuses, and Paper Rex, took first places in their groups, and they met for the first time in the final of the upper bracket of playoffs: and then Paper Rex turned out to be stronger. However, Evil Geniuses were able to take revenge in the decisive match, before which the team played a furious match in the lower bracket against last year's champions, LOUD, which ended with a score of 3:2.
The final of the tournament attracted over 1.29 million viewers at peak, which is 28% more than the second most popular match of the tournament (also a confrontation between PRX and EG, in the upper bracket of the playoffs). It is noteworthy that only two matches of the tournament were able to overcome the mark of 1 million concurrent viewers.
The absence of LOUD in the finals could not but affect the audience figures of the final day of Valorant Champions 2023: according to all metrics, the 2023 edition gathered fewer viewers than last year's competition. Average & peak concurrent viewership, as well as watch time of the final day, decreased by about 10-20%.
At the same time, some languages showed positive dynamics during the final day. If the peaks of Japanese and Portuguese (two of the three key Valorant languages) have declined, then the audience of English broadcasts has even grown. Similarly, there was an increase in Spanish-language broadcasts, which entered the top three languages in terms of popularity on the final day.
The most popular & the most watched Valorant esports events of all time
As a result, Valorant Champions 2023 ended the trend of world championships updating the records of the discipline in terms of concurrent viewership. Alas, the 2023 edition lost not only to the last tournament of the series but also to the debut event of the 2023 season, VCT LOCK//IN. Despite the lack of a record, Valorant Champions 2023 can hardly be called anything other than a success. Even though there is no record, and the competition failed to get ahead of BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023 in terms of viewership metrics (which would be an extremely significant success for Valorant in the context of rivalry with CS:GO). Valorant has definitely secured its place among the premier esports disciplines and confirmed that the scene has a huge potential to grow further.
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