Valorant Champions 2024's opening day records similar peak to 2023 despite considerable drop in watch time

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The end-of-the-year event for the Valorant tier-1 esports scene has arrived. Held in South Korea, Valorant Champions 2024 kicked off to two matches, featuring many of the globe’s most popular and most competitive teams. Despite the competing teams appearing at first glance to be ideal for viewership, the 2024 event has recorded lower viewership than last year’s Champions across the board. 

The Champions 2024 event began on August 1, and will continue through the entire month, with the grand final scheduled for August 25. The opening day of the event featured Gen.G Esports facing off against Sentinels, and Team Heretics playing FunPlus Phoenix. According to statistics from each of the major Valorant regional circuits in Stage 2 of this year, each of these teams ranks within their own region’s top 5 most popular teams by Average Viewers.

On paper, these matches should have resulted in extremely successful viewership for the 2024 end-of-year event. Although the event did in fact open to sizeable viewership, all major metrics show a decrease in viewership compared to last year. With the power of Esports Charts’ database of esports event viewership, come examine the potential reasons why this year’s Valorant Champions event fell just short.

The opening day of the 2024 event, which featured two separate matches, generated 2.86M Hours Watched in total and received 652.8K Peak Viewers for Gen.G’s match against Sentinels. To be clear, these numbers are not particularly worrying. Average viewership dropped by only 10.7%, and peak concurrent viewership by only 1.3%. The Valorant Champions 2024 event has already become the fourth-most popular Valorant tournament of 2024 by peak concurrent viewership on its first day. 

The issue at hand for Riot Games’ Shooter title is a lack of representation from Brazilian teams. In terms of language-based statistics, the 2024 event recorded either stable dynamics or an increase in peak viewership from English, Japanese, Spanish audiences, and a significant increase for Korean-language viewership. 

Twitch surprised the world when they announced that they would cease operations in South Korea earlier this year. Since then, many livestreaming platforms have been competing to secure the market gap left behind by Twitch. At the opening day of Valorant Champions 2024, most Korean viewership came from YouTube Live, but CHZZK was close behind, emerging far ahead of AfreecaTV. Despite this growth for many languages at the Champions event, Portuguese-language viewership has decreased by over 88.7% compared to 2023’s opening day. 

Leviatán, KRÜ Esports, and Sentinels all feature one singular Brazilian player on their rosters, but this has not been enough to keep Portuguese-language viewership interested in the event. LOUD, a Brazilian esports organization featuring mainly Brazilian players, are undoubtedly one of the most popular Valorant teams in the world thanks to the large and passionate Brazilian audience behind them. 

LOUD’s failure to qualify for this year’s Champions event has already had a significantly negative effect on the event’s viewership, and this will only continue as the event progresses. Portuguese-language viewership for Valorant has disappeared from its usual number two spot, and failed to rank within even the top 5 most popular languages for Champions 2024’s opening day.

Although LOUD are not in attendance, at least both Sentinels and Gen.G are. These two teams are some of Valorant’s most popular organizations, and Gen.G’s popularity will likely only be bolstered by the fact that they are competing on home soil. 

The match between FunPlus Phoenix and Team Heretics received 502.9K Peak Viewers, but we are unable to account for viewership from Chinese livestreaming platforms, due to publicly available statistics from these platforms being unreliable and unfit for comparison with other platforms. 

The opening day of Valorant Champions 2024 was successful, but not as successful as past Champions events. The effect of LOUD’s failure to qualify for the event has already been felt, and this Champions event will likely continue to struggle to reach Portuguese-speaking audiences and engage them. Follow the event’s viewership statistics with Esports Charts as the event continues, and visit the Schedule tab of the tournament page to see when the next matches are scheduled for.