The final event of this year's Valorant esports season — the Champions 2025 — concluded with a bang. Fans inside a packed Accor Arena in Paris witnessed a keenly contested Grand Final, one that went all the way and ended with a fairytale victory.
The Valorant Champions 2025 capped off a fine three weeks for NRG Esports, who went unbeaten to claim their maiden international title. The American esports organization had a pretty modest track record in the game and had never reached the top three at global events.
As a result, very few analysts gave NRG Esports a chance heading into the prestigious tournament. Only 3.9% of Pick'Ems predicted the side as the winner, but they defied all expectations to come out on top and bag its biggest Valorant trophy yet.
The victory also ensured history for team captain Ethan "Ethan" Arnold, who previously won the Valorant Champions 2023 with Evil Geniuses. This made him the first player to claim multiple Valorant Champions trophies and also the first pro to do so with different teams.
These were not the only records broken at this $2.25 million prize pool Valorant competition. Quite a few other milestones were achieved, with the game and in esports in general, and Esports Charts takes a closer look at these landmark numbers.
Most crucial of all was the fact that the Valorant Champions 2025 finished as the third-most popular event in the game with 1.47 million Peak Viewers (PV). The Grand Final between NRG Esports and Fnatic also ended as the agent shooter's fifth-most popular game by concurrent viewers.
This tournament, which serves as Valorant's world championship, also entered the game's all-time top three by watch time. It accrued over 47.5 million Hours Watched (HW) across 102 hours of airtime, with the leader, the Valorant Champions 2022, the only entry to touch the 60 million HW mark so far.
Moving to more specific records, Arabic touched a new Valorant record for peak live viewers. The language hit 15,272 PV during the Group D Winners Match between Team Heretics and T1 on September 18. Arabic also set a Valorant record for livestreams on Twitch, accumulating 15,200 concurrent viewers.
Similarly, YouTube peak viewership records for the game were achieved in English and French. The latter's rise was especially substantial, seeing a massive spike of 416%, mainly thanks to French streaming star Adrien "ZeratoR" Nougaret, who streamed live from the Accor Arena during the Grand Final.
Valorant esports also set a new peak viewership record on YouTube, attracting 679,414 concurrent viewers to handily beat the previous record set at the Valorant Masters Bangkok 2025.
Lastly, TikTok showed improvements in English, Vietnamese and Indonesian. The Pacific region is a pretty crucial one for Valorant, and with representatives like Paper Rex (a global fan-favorite) and Rex Regum Qeon, Southeast Asian audiences had enough reason to tune in to catch the action as it happened.
The video-sharing app, like YouTube, saw a new Valorant esports record created. It did 71,637 live viewers, obliterating the previous mark set at the Esports World Cup 2025 by more than 63%.
The media value of the Valorant Champions 2025 is $23,469,650. It is the least among the five editions of the series held so far, but there is not much difference separating them, with only the leader, the 2022 iteration, valued at a much higher cost of $30,093,071.
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