Sentinels and tarik power viewership for Valorant Champions 2024 Playoffs opening round

Loading

The first round of playoffs matches at Valorant Champions 2024 have come to a close. Sentinels triuphmed over DRX, EDward Gaming remains China’s best team after beating Trace Esports, G2 Esports lost 0:2 against Leviatán, and Team Heretics felled Fnatic 2:0. 

Viewership for the opening parts of playoffs has been acceptable for Champions so far; the upper-bracket quarterfinals received 18% fewer hours of watch time, but average viewership decreased by only 11%. While viewership is not exactly high for this Champions event, it has managed to receive only slightly lower stats than last year, despite the almost entire disappearance of Portuguese-language viewership for the event. 

At Champions 2023, Portuguese-language viewership was accountable for over 288,000 peak concurrent viewers during the upper-bracket quarterfinals. At this year’s tournament, the language has not even ranked within the top three most popular languages of the playoffs. The lack of Portuguese-language viewership is largely due to Brazilian team LOUD not qualifying for this year’s Champions: without a team to support, Brazilian fans just are not interested. 

In total, the first four matches of playoffs received 4.15M Hours Watched and maintained 405.2K Average Viewers. The most popular game of the event was Sentinels’ 2-0 victory, which received over 101.3K Peak Viewers from Sentinels-affiliated streamer tarik. This match was the only game of the playoffs to receive over 600K concurrent viewers. Team Heretics’ match against Fnatic was the next-most popular game, with G2 and Leviatán receiving just more than 520.8K PV for their quarterfinal. 

Leviatán’s star-player aspas is one of Valorant’s most-revered professionals, and one of the game’s most popular players thanks to his sizeable Brazilian following. It could be expected that aspas’ performances and his success with his new team would bring a Portuguese-language following to LEV’s matches, but this has not been the case. On August 15, Team Heretics’ game against Fnatic received slightly more Portuguese-speaking viewers at peak than Leviatán’s game against EDward Gaming. If Valorant wants to revive their Brazilian audience, it seems that LOUD is the only way. 

Despite viewership dynamics showing red compared to last year, the viewership for the first part of Valorant Champions 2024 playoffs has been positive. The esports title is earning solid viewership without the massive support of the Brazilian audience, proving that it does not need to rely on any specific team or audience to generate high viewership for their esports events. The event will end on August 25 with its grand final, but until then, Esports Charts will continue to cover the viewership for the world’s premiere Valorant tournament.