VCS Dusk and Dawn 2023 viewership statistics and analysis

Last weekend the VCS Dusk 2023 Split came to an end, also marking the final event of the Vietnam Championship Series for 2023. The league experienced some controversy as competitor SBTC Esports was suspended from the league and some members of the team and organisation have received bans from competing in Riot tournaments.

Viewership has been high for the league this season, although it remains unable to beat the viewership heights reached in 2020 and 2019. Team GAM Esports were victorious in the Dusk season and qualified directly for this year’s Worlds event, alongside second-place Team Whales who also earned a spot in the event.

With Peak Viewers figures that rival the previous popular years of viewership for the league, how exactly did the league perform overall?

VCS Dusk 2023 Viewership Statistics

Viewership statistics for the VCS Dusk 2023

The Dusk season alone for this year was relatively popular, albeit the less popular of the two Splits for this year. The event received 5.35M hours of watch time in total, over 1M fewer hours than the Summer Split of last year. However, it is important to note that this year’s Dusk Split experienced the lowest Airtime of any VCS season in our database, with only a little over 139 hours of broadcasting time recorded.

To account for this low Airtime, Average Viewers is a more representative figure for understanding the viewership performance in relation to other VCS events. The Dusk 2023 Season received 38.3K AV throughout the season, which ranks it as the fifth-highest event per AV in the VCS.

Looking towards the most popular matches of the season, the Week 1 match between GAM Esports and SBTC Esports was the most popular match of the entire league. This match received 182K concurrent viewers at peak, roughly 40K viewers more than the next-most popular game, the Grand Finals of the season. SBTC was highly successful last season and finished the Dawn 2023 Split in second place, losing out to GAM in the Grand Finals. The early Week 1 match-up between the supposedly two best teams in the league brought a lot of hype to the start of the league and no other match throughout the Playoffs was able to compete with it.

The Dusk 2023 season was one of the more successful events of recent years for the VCS, but the Dawn 2023 Split was even more successful in terms of drawing in peak viewership, and even collecting a much higher amount of watch time, with the help of its longer broadcasting time.

VCS 2023 Season Viewership

VCS 2023 (Dawn&Dusk Splits) Viewership Statistics

Comparing the two Splits for the 2023 season, we can see that the Dawn Split outperformed the Dusk Split in almost all categories, except AV. Using the data for the previous VCS seasons we have available, the Summer Split is normally the more successful of the two seasons in terms of viewership. 2023 was extraordinary in that the latter Split of the year was less successful in terms of garnering viewership.

The VCS Dawn 2023 season recorded 6.27M Hours Watched and garnered just slightly fewer Average Viewers throughout the season. Although the Dusk event was more successful in this metric, it may have been a slight advantage to have a more condensed season with less Airtime.

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The most popular game of the Dawn 2023 season was once again GAM against SBTC. GAM and SBTC were the teams to watch for this season, and the top three most popular matches of the entire league were these two facing off against each other. In the Grand Finals (230K PV), Playoffs Day 4 (217K PV), and Week 7 (153.7K), the matches of GAM and SBTC were highly watched compared to other matches of the season.

The Peak Viewers figure was so high for the Dawn 2023 season that it rivalled the viewership of the Spring 2021 and Summer 2020 seasons, which both received 232K PV at best. 2020 and 2021 were some of the biggest years for League of Legends viewership, so it makes it only more impressive that the VCS was able to replicate this attention in 2023. For a better idea of how exactly the 2023 Splits compared to previous years, let’s make a direct comparison.

VCS 2023 Viewership Comparison

VCS Seasons Viewership (2023-2021), per Hours Watched & Peak Viewers

In terms of Hours Watched, the VCS 2023 season performed quite strongly compared to previous seasons. It was unable to best the watch time of the 2021 season, but this Split was one of the most-watched VCS seasons in the circuit’s history. Comparative to recent years, the VCS has shown some growth this season.

Looking at Peak Viewers, however, the VCS was much more impressive for its 2023 season. The 2023 season was one of the most-watched seasons in recent years. The VCS Dawn and Dusk Seasons were, respectively, the fourth and fifth-most-watched VCS Splits in our database. Peak concurrent viewers from the Spring 2022 to the Dusk 2023 season more than doubled, perhaps due to the SBTC team giving GAM Esports some competition.

VCS 2023 was one of the more popular seasons of late and continues to prove that there is room to grow and new viewership to develop in its region. After over 10 years of League of Legends in Vietnam, it remains an esports discipline that continues to show its strength in viewership and receives both high concurrent viewers and watch time.

The 2023 Season World Championship, known as Worlds 2023, will be held in South Korea this year starting on October 10th. GAM Esports and Team Whales will represent the Vietnamese region for the event, and both teams will be trying to represent their region as one of the strongest across the globe. Keep up to date with the various League of Legends regional leagues with our viewership statistics, and keep an eye out for articles covering the Worlds event this year.