VCS Winter 2021 Review: how coronavirus affected one of the largest League of Legends regions

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The Vietnam Championship Series regional League of Legends league has suffered quite badly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its representative teams had to skip three international tournaments in a row: Worlds 2020, Mid-Season Invitational 2021 and Worlds 2021. The final tournament, VCS Winter 2021, took place after the main World Championship, when the LoL community had already gone on an off-season break. We will analyze how this situation affected championship views.

The Vietnam Championship Series was launched in 2013 by Riot Games and Garena as part of the Garena Premier League. However, in 2018, the VCS split from the GPL and became an independent league run by Riot Games. Since then the season included spring and summer splits, but in 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the usual VCS Summer had to be canceled and replaced by VCS Winter, which took place at the end of the year.

The biggest prize pool for two years ($ 52.77K) is the only thing that VCS Winter 2021 can boast of. But this achievement was only due to the change in the exchange rate of VND to USD, as each tournament raffled 1.2 billion Vietnamese dong.

In terms of viewership, the sudden winter split is far behind the other championships. The Peak Viewers number at VCS Winter 2021 was more than two times fewer and reached 114.7K spectators during the broadcast of the Grand Finals between GAM Esports and CERBERUS Esports. The situation with Hours Watched (5.59 million) and Average Viewers (34.1K people) is similar.

Despite such major changes in the season, some results have remained the same. The most popular team in VCS Winter 2021 was GAM Esports. Its games took over the top five most-watched matches in the tournament. Viewers watched GAM matches for 2.1 million hours, which is approximately 37.5% of the total Hours Watched of the event.

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The VCS Winter 2021 shows that LoL tournaments can lose most of their audience if they are held after the World Championship. This is due to the difficult situation with COVID-19 in Vietnam. It's sad to see the region that hosted the Mid-Season Invitational 2019 drops in popularity. We hope that in 2022 the Vietnam Championship Series will return to its usual format and its teams will finally be able to participate in international championships.

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