Specificity of Valorant esports audience and key role of community streams

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Top Valorant tournaments gather hundreds of thousands of fans at the broadcasts, and the concurrent audience often exceeds a million people. But the viewership achievements of Valorant events have a serious nuance: unlike other disciplines, unofficial streamers make an extremely large contribution to the final audience numbers. So, the influential content creators are the ones who have a big impact on the discipline's audience.

With each tournament, the community casters have more and more power in the viewership structure. VCT 2022: Reykjavik showed highly competitive numbers not only in comparison to the previous tournaments of the series, but also to the events of competing disciplines. But when you look at the statistics of individual broadcasts, the situation does not look so positive for the Riot Games title.

Since the launch of Valorant Champions Tour, the Average Viewers number on the official English stream during international events only increased. Towards the season culmination in Valorant Champions 2021, the growth rate slowed down a bit, and the new season’s situation changed significantly as the Average Viewers number on the main English broadcast dropped by over 40%.

Last VCT 2022: Reykjavik had more than half of the Hours Watched from community casters. It is worth mentioning that not only English-speaking streamers (23% of total Hours Watched number), but also their colleagues from Japan (15% of total HW number) and Brazil (Portuguese accounted for 7% of total HW number). 

Considering the VCT 2022: Reykjavik's Hours Watched number by broadcasting language, we can see the same trend: the bulk of Hours Watched is accumulated by content creators, not official broadcasts.

For example, 54% of the nearly 14 million Hours Watched on English-language streams belongs to community streamers. The Japanese broadcasts had a significant growth in audience numbers: the share of Japanese broadcasts in the total Hours Watched number increased from 13.8% (during Valorant Champions 2021) to 26.6%: it happened due to the exciting performance of the tournament's dark horses, ZETA DIVISION from Japan. Broadcasts from this country became the second most watched, amassing almost 9 million Hours Watched, of which unofficial streams accounted for 56%.  

Third place is taken by the Portuguese streams. Brazilian fans also had a reason to follow the broadcasts closely, as their favorites LOUD made it to the finals. Portuguese streams racked up 5.6 million Hours Watched, and this is the only language where the share of official broadcasts is higher: Brazilian content creators, including Coreano, a streamer from LOUD, accounted for 46% of the total Hours Watched number by the language.

Among the unofficial channels, the largest audience was gathered by top streamers and former pro players with already formed fan bases. At the same time, there was no place in the top for streamers from other platforms; the leaders are solely Twitch creators.

A former professional CS:GO player tarik is one of the most watched content creators among the English-speaking streamers of the event. His broadcasts accumulated 3.2 million Hours Watched, 10% of the total HW number. Next to him is TenZ, a current professional Valorant player from Canada who plays for Sentinels, one of the strongest teams in the US. His broadcasts totaled 2.9 million Hours Watched, which accounted for 9% of the tournament's total. 

Fps_shaka, a former pro player who became a streamer, amassed a high number of Hours Watched from the Japanese audience. The streamer, well known to PUBG fans, also covers different tournaments on his channel. During VCT 2022: Reykjavik, he reached 2.2 million Hours Watched, which is about 43% of the total Hours Watched number of Japanese community casters. Moreover, he surpassed the official Japanese broadcast by this metric.

There is only one creator in the Top 5 representing Portuguese-speaking streamers — Coreano. He is the official content creator of the Brazilian LOUD team, so it is not a surprise that his broadcasts amassed 1.2 million Hours Watched.

One more Japanese streamer, Jasper7se, rounds out the Top 5 most watched community casters. He is a former Overwatch pro player who switched to streaming and became a successful content creator. His broadcasts accumulated 900K Hours Watched.

Besides the above-mentioned creators, two content makers of the ZETA DIVISION team gathered a large number of Peak Viewers. In third place is k4sen — a well-known commentator and showman who has worked in many disciplines including Call of Duty and Fortnite. His broadcast was watched by 66K Peak Viewers.

In fourth place is Stylishnoob, another former Overwatch e-athlete who now streams shooters, especially ZETA team games. His stream was followed by 65K Peak Viewers.

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We can say that Valorant is a really popular esports discipline, which is highly demanded in America and Asian countries. At the same time, its broadcasting model implies a significant influence of community broadcasts, which distinguishes the game from CS:GO or Dota 2. Unofficial streams are the driving force of the discipline's media growth, as can be seen in the increase of the audience from Japan.

You can find more information about community casters and other VCT: Stage 1 Masters - Reykjavik broadcasts in the dashboard: contact our sales department to discuss the terms.