Valorant Champions 2023 Last Chance Qualifiers Viewership totals

The last matches of the Last Chance Qualifiers for Valorant Champions 2023 ended on July 23. Several top teams with big fan bases from the Americas and EMEA didn’t qualify for the world championship, but Japanese fans will be excited to cheer for their sole representative.

Teams from the Americas, EMEA, and Pacific, who did not receive direct invites to finals based on their affiliate leagues' results, participated in the Last Chance Qualifiers. Two slots were contested in EMEA, as the region's representative, Fnatic, became the Valorant Champions Tour 2023: Masters Tokyo champion. Meanwhile, only one slot was contested in the Americas and Pacific.

Disclaimer. Data from Chinese streaming services was not included in the overall metrics due to unreliability of provided data

Americas

In the Americas, the slot was acquired by KRÜ Esports, which defeated Leviatán 3-1 in the decisive match. Apparently, few fans expected to see a Latin American derby in the qualification final: many viewers from North America and Brazil didn't pay much attention to the final, so KRÜ Esports' series against Leviatán did not even make it into the Top 5 most popular matches of the qualifiers.

Valorant Champions 2023 Last Chance Qualifiers Americas Statistics VCT 2023: Americas LCQ Most Popular Matches

The Last Chance Qualifiers in the Americas accumulated 6.7 million Hours Watched. The Average Viewers number for the broadcasts was 200.1K people, with the Peak Viewers number reaching 385.5K viewers. The most popular match of the qualifiers was the series between Sentinels and 100 Thieves.

KRÜ Esports may not be able to compete with Sentinels, Cloud9, and 100 Thieves in terms of media presence, but the Latin American club has its own methods of engaging with the audience. One of the organization's leaders and streamers is Sergio Agüero, a former striker for the Argentine national team, and recently his good friend and national team teammate Lionel Messi proudly wore the KRÜ Esports jersey. It's worth noting that Agüero regularly streams his team's matches, and the final against Leviatán on his channel was watched by over 18.7K Peak Viewers. It is quite likely that such a powerful "football lobby" from KRÜ Esports will help Valorant Champions 2023 attract more viewers from Latin America.

EMEA

In the Last Chance Qualifier for EMEA, two quotas were contested, and slots went to Giants and Natus Vincere (Giants won the final with the score of 3:0). As in the case of Americas, the final series did not make it into the Top 5 most popular matches of the qualifying stage. However, in the case of the European qualifiers, this is due to the fact that the final had no importance from a tournament point of view.

Valorant Champions 2023 Last Chance Qualifiers EMEA Statistics VCT 2023: EMEA LCQ Most Popular Matches

The Last Chance Qualifiers in the EMEA region accumulated 3.5 million Hours Watched. The Average Viewers number for the broadcasts was 126.5K people, with the Peak Viewers number reaching 249.2K viewers.

The most popular match of the stage was the series between Team Heretics and KOI. It's worth noting that these teams belong to popular Spanish streamers TheGrefg and ibai, who provided coverage of their teams' performances in the tournament. In the second position was the game between BBL Esports and Karmine Corp, which also belong to popular content creators: KendineMuzisyen, wtcN, and Kаmet0. In total, these five have around 33.7 million followers on Twitch, but it is unlikely that these streamers will cover Valorant Champions 2023 without their teams.

Pacific

In the Pacific region, ZETA DIVISION was the strongest team in the Last Chance Qualifier, beating Team Secret 3-1 in the final. Japanese Valorant fans should be happy, because the qualifiers started off on a very sad note: Japan's DetonatioN FocusMe lost in its first elimination match and left the tournament, becoming the only team among all Valorant Pro Tour affiliate leagues that failed to win a single game during the season (0-9 in Pacific and 0-1 in LCQ). Interestingly, KRÜ Esports was also 0-9 in the Americas league, but then the team managed to win the LCQ.

Valorant Champions 2023 Last Chance Qualifiers Pacific Statistics VCT 2023: Pacific LCQ Most Popular Matches

Pacific LCQ matches accumulated 4.4 million Hours Watched, drew 134K Average Viewers on broadcasts and 387K Peak Viewers. Unlike the other two leagues, the most popular qualification match here was the grand final between ZETA DIVISION and Team Secret.

Valorant is a very popular discipline in Japan, and the absence of Japanese teams at the World Championships could have a big impact on the final viewership statistics of the tournament.

China

In addition to the qualifiers in the main regions of Valorant, a separate qualification was also provided for Chinese teams (just as it was within VCT 2023: Masters Tokyo). In the qualifying tournament, which was held in two stages, the best teams of the FGC Valorant Invitational 2023 competed. As part of the Chinese segment of the Valorant esports circuit, teams do not receive invites to international events based on the results of the season in the domestic league, so the three best teams of qualifiers made it to the world championship: EDward Gaming, Bilibili Gaming and FunPlus Phoenix.

The China Qualifier matches were broadcast on major Western live-streaming platforms, Twitch and YouTube. Despite the qualifiers showing good stats on these, overall stats still appear extremely modest results for China: after all, the majority of viewers gather on Chinese platforms like Huya and Douyu. Alas, for a number of reasons, this data cannot be recorded in general indicators, so the statistics are based only on Twitch and YouTube indicators.

Comparison of Qualifiers with Other Tournaments

If we compare all LCQ 2023 tournaments, one can see that Americas has the highest Average Viewers number and Hours Watched. The same region could also be the leader in terms of Peak Viewers, but was just behind Pacific. But the qualifiers in EMEA turned out to be the weakest by all metrics. After all, community casting from the top streamers plays a very important role there, which was greatly reduced after the exit of certain teams.

Last Chance Qualifiers comparison

The comparison with last year's qualifiers looks interesting. The overall statistics for LCQ 2022 were better than LCQ 2023 in all metrics. However, it is important to note that in 2022, the qualifiers were held in five regions, not just four, so the broadcast time and Hours Watched differ significantly. The Peak Viewers number also saw a significant decline. The reason for the enormous hype during last year's LCQ was shroud — one of the most popular streamers in the shooter genre — he greatly influenced the previous qualifiers as he debuted on the Valorant pro scene playing for Sentinels.

Last Chance Qualifiers and BLAST Paris Major Qualifers comparison

We have also compared the statistics for LCQ 2023 with the overall numbers of the RMR tournaments leading up to the BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023 for CS:GO, since both are basically the qualifiers for the biggest/most important event in each respective discipline. The peak viewership for Valorant qualifiers was higher than that of the Valve shooter. In terms of Hours Watched, the RMR qualifiers came out ahead, and that is because of the longer broadcast time and higher average viewership.

The absence of teams like Sentinels, Karmine Corp, KOI, and other clubs with strong community casting will certainly have a negative impact on the audience reach of Valorant Champions 2023. If Japan had also been without its representatives, the tournament would hardly have been able to claim any viewer records.