VCT 2023: Game Changers EMEA — huge impact of community casting on female Valorant esports

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Riot Games continues to develop the female esports scene in Valorant. Recently, the VCT 2023: Game Changers tournament in the EMEA region came to an end, with matches attracting tens of thousands of viewers. The tournament owes much of its success to community casting: Esports Charts has calculated the contribution of independent streamers to audience reach and how they influence the popularity of some teams.

The VCT 2023: Game Changers EMEA tournament featured 16 teams from Europe, the Middle East, and Turkey. Among the participants were female teams from major esports organizations, such as G2 Gozen, NAVI Celestials, NIP Lightning, Karmine Corp GC, and others. After the Group Stage, only six teams made it to the playoff bracket. In the final series, G2 Gozen defeated BBL Queens 3-2 and became the champion.

VCT 2023: Game Changers EMEA Viewership Results 

The VCT 2023: Game Changers EMEA matches accumulated almost 1.44 million Hours Watched and drew 19.6K Average Viewers. 

The most popular match of the tournament was the series between BBL Queens and Karmine Corp GC in the upper bracket semifinals, attracting 61.3K Peak Viewers. Karmine Corp also became the most popular team of the event, far surpassing other participants by both total Hours Watched (834.4K) and Average Viewers per match (34.5K).

The average number of viewers for Karmine Corp matches was almost twice more than that of its closest competitor (BBL Queens). Many other teams, showing results in several thousand viewers in this metric, are almost entirely indebted to Karmine Corp for their numbers.

We have specifically looked at how the average viewership for matches changed when teams played against Karmine Corp and against other teams. For example, the Average Viewers number for Guild X matches is 7.4K, but if we exclude the game against the French team, that number drops to 1.8K (-75%). For the KPI Shine team, this number drops by a whopping 94%. However, in the case of G2 Gozen, the metric remains unchanged as the team did not encounter Karmine Corp in the course of the tournament.

Karmine Corp owes its viewership success to community casting, namely, the broadcasts of the popular French streamer Kamet0, co-owner of Karmine Corp. He actively covered the tournament on his channel, mainly broadcasting his team's games. In total, the French creator streamed for ten game days and during this time gained about 787K Hours Watched. The second most popular community caster was KendineMuzisyen, a Turkish streamer and co-owner of BBL Esports. He broadcast for two days and scored almost 162K HW.

Community Casting at VCT 2023: Game Changers EMEA

Community casting has always been popular at Valorant events. However, while independent streamers play more of a supportive role at male tournaments, they play a key role at female tournaments. We should recall the case of VCT 2023 Game Changers open qualification broadcast in North America, when popular streamer Disguised Toast streamed the games of his team Disguised GC’s and manged to set a record for the number of viewers at female Valorant tournaments. A similar situation happened at a tournament in EMEA.

Official broadcasts accounted for only 16.2% of the total HW of VCT 2023: Game Changers EMEA, while independent streamers accounted for 83.8%. It is noteworthy that the organizers did not even stream the Group Stage matches and only launched streams during the playoffs.

Both streamers, Kamet0 and KendineMuzisyen, made a significant contribution to the Hours Watched that their teams accumulated during the tournament. It should be noted that Kamet0 streamed matches for ten game days, while KendineMuzisyen streamed for only two days, but still added an impressive percentage to the total Hours Watched of his team, BBL Queens.

If Karmine Corp had made it to the final, Kamet0 would have continued to cover the matches of the team on his channel — then the tournament would have undoubtedly attracted even more viewers and perhaps broken the record set by Disguised Toast. This dependence on top community casters for audience reach is very similar to the situation with the EMEA Masters league in League of Legends. Interestingly, Kamet0's broadcasts of Karmine Corp games in another discipline by Riot Games also have a similar effect.

Game Changers leagues in other regions also receive a good boost from community casting. This is especially evident when analyzing statistics from Brazil and North America. We will discuss the situation in these regions in more detail in the following articles.

The VCT 2023: Game Changers season will last until the end of the year and will take place in several stages. Firstly, participants from all over the world will compete in tournaments in North America, EMEA, Brazil, Latin America, South Korea, Japan, China, and the Asia-Pacific region. They will fight for prize pools, ranking points, and quotas for the final. At the end of the year, the top eight teams from different regions will face off at the final major tournament in Sao Paulo.