VCT 2023: LOCK//IN Sao Paulo intermediate viewership results
February 21. Viewership statistics have been updated. The numbers on the charts have been updated too.
Almost half of the VCT 2023: LOCK//IN Sao Paulo matches are over, meaning that it's time to sum up the intermediate results of the first major Valorant championship in 2023. Hundreds of thousands of people watched the tournament, held in Brazil, during the first six days, making it the fifth-highest event by Peak Viewers in the discipline. However, it hasn't managed to surpass the one-million concurrent viewers bar yet.
VCT 2023: LOCK//IN Sao Paulo is a large international tournament which opens a new esports season in Valorant. It features 32 teams: ten teams from each of the newly formed EMEA, Americas, and Pacific franchises, as well as two guest teams from China.
DRX reached the LOCK//IN semifinals / Photo: twitter.com/DRX_VS
Valorant had not previously seen such large international events. The World Championships in Germany and Turkey had only 16 teams, but there were twice as many participants in Brazil. We should also highlight the non-standard format of the tournament. The previous championship had Group Stages with double-elimination brackets, but LOCK//IN saw one big single-elimination bracket where teams don't have a chance for mistakes.
LOCK//IN competitors got an opportunity to test their lineups before the start of the main season, and the winning team will bring its region an extra slot in the Masters 2023 World Championship.
Current Results of the Event
The teams that played at the first part of the event were Cloud9, Evil Geniuses, Gen.G, as well as teams of clubs owned by popular Twitch streamers. However, these teams did not achieve great results, as they were eliminated in the first two rounds. LOUD and DRX reached the semifinals: the Brazilian team defeated Gen.G Esports, Karmine Corp and NRG Esports, and the Korean team beat BBL Esports, Cloud9 and Talon Esports. LOUD and DRX will now face each other in the tournament's first semifinal on March 2.
LIVE statistics of the event are available here
Tournament Statistics
Statistics of the first six days of VCT 2023: LOCK//IN Sao Paulo
VCT 2023: LOCK//IN Sao Paulo matches accumulated 16.8 million Hours Watched in the first six days of the tournament. The event saw 382.3K Average Viewers. The match between LOUD and NRG Esports attracted the biggest audience in front of the screens, 879.8K Peak Viewers. These two teams became the leaders by Average Viewers number.
English and Portuguese became the main languages in the first half of the tournament, accounting for 41.7% and 20.7% of the total Hours Watched, respectively, and also becoming the leaders by Peak Viewers. Twitch expectedly ranked as the dominant platform, accounting for more than 82.7% of the total Hours Watched.
VCT 2023: LOCK//IN Sao Paulo matches were covered on both the official Riot Games channels and the channels of popular community casters (more than 160 channels in total). Among them are Tarik, kamet0, shroud, coreano, fps_shaka, and others. The majority of the audience preferred to watch Tarik's broadcasts, which accumulated 2.8 million Hours Watched over the first half of the tournament and reached 161.6K Peak Viewers. In comparison, the official English-language channel had only 106.7K PV.
Comparison with Other Valorant Tournaments
Only half of the VCT 2023: LOCK//IN Sao Paulo matches have been played so far, but the tournament is already in the Top 5 of the most popular events in the discipline by Peak Viewers. Two World Championships and two Masters finals in Reykjavik outpaced it. Such result is quite good for the event, especially when you consider the difference in statuses of the tournaments listed.
So far, the championship in Sao Paulo did not manage to break the bar of a million Peak Viewers. The closest to that mark was the series between LOUD and NRG Esports (879.8K PV). This match was interesting because NRG Esports was represented by former OpTic Gaming players against whom LOUD played in the VALORANT Champions 2022 finals. These teams have a long history of rivalry with each other and their encounter would have been worthy of the finals, but it took place much earlier.
There will also be a lot of hot matches in the other part of the bracket, like Fnatic vs. Sentinels. It would be especially interesting if the latter could make it to the finals and face LOUD there. Note that after LOUD won VALORANT Championships 2022, two players of the squad joined Sentinels. This fact could add intrigue to the rivalry between the Brazilian and American clubs. If it takes place, of course.
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Stage 2 takes place from February 22 to 27, where matches will be played in the other part of the bracket up to the semifinals. Team Liquid, Natus Vincere, Rex Regum Qeon, Sentinels, T1, and other teams will play there. There will be two semifinal matches and the tournament's Grand Final from March 2 to March 4.
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