VCT 2024 Kickoff Most Popular Teams

The recent VCT 2024 Kickoff events were the inaugural tournaments of the Valorant Champions Tour 2024 season. The top 2 teams of each region were determined for the upcoming Masters Madrid event, and they are all raring to go later this month in Spain. A key question arises after every qualification event: "Who were the most popular teams?”. Teams can determine an event’s success in terms of online viewership; oftentimes the Grand Finals of an event can be watched by fewer viewers than the Semifinals if fan-favourite teams are eliminated. In this article, we will look through the most popular teams of all four regions, which may help readers assess the possible viewership of the upcoming Masters tournament. The most popular teams of all VCT 2024 Kickoff events Across all four major regions, the teams competing in the VCT 2024 Americas Kickoff received far more viewership than their international competitors. LOUD was the best of the best, receiving 527.8K Average Viewers for all streamed matches during their Kickoff event. LOUD’s success came directly from Brazilian audiences. Throughout the entire event, LOUD was by far the most popular team thanks to support from the official broadcasters and mainly Brazilian community casters. On average, games featuring LOUD earned 100K Average Viewers more than games without them. The grand final match between LOUD and Sentinels garnered 628.8K AV, considerably boosting their overall figure. Sentinels were the closest team in popularity to LOUD with 446.9K Average Viewers. The North American organisation is one of Valorant’s most popular for a multitude of reasons, but tarik’s support is crucial for Sentinels’ high viewership. Tarik is Valorant’s most popular community streamer, and he continued this trend in 2024 by being the most-watched channel of the Americas Kickoff with 3.96M Hours Watched. Tarik’s support as an official member of the Sentinels organisation brings not only excitement but also viewers to their matches. Leviatán sits in third place with 424.9K Average Viewers. By the end of the 2023 VCT season, the Argentinan esports organisation rebuilt its team around new international players. They brought on two United States citizens, tex and C0M, and star Brazilian Duelist aspas. He had previously achieved a world championship with LOUD in 2022, and aspas’ Brazilian fans followed him to Leviatán. The esports organisation received extremely high viewership from Brazilian-Portuguese-speaking demographics, as well as English-speaking broadcasts, likely thanks to the inclusion of tex and C0M. Ultimately, the roster did not escape the Group Stage. Nevertheless, being placed in Group B alongside LOUD and Sentinels allowed Leviatán to garner high average viewership consistently. The final two teams of this ranking, NRG Esports and 100 Thieves, are two North American rosters. NRG picked up two reigning world champions Demo1 and Ethan at the end of 2023, with their new roster being hailed as potentially the strongest Americas team. They received 416.9K Average Viewers for their matches through the group stage and the ultimate semifinal loss against Sentinels. NRG’s group stage opponents, Cloud9 and FURIA Esports, are in the lower half of teams ranked by average viewership. Despite the less-than-advantageous matches for drawing high viewership, NRG managed to be one of four global teams to reach more than 400K AV. 100 Thieves on the other hand suffered a quick 0:2 exit from the Kickoff tournament. 100T happened upon the good fortune of losing to both Sentinels and Leviatán in their early matches, two teams who bring considerably high viewership with them. Both of 100 Thieves’ games at the Kickoff event are above average for viewership compared to the event as a whole. The most popular team of each region by average viewership The Americas region was by far the most popular of all regional Kickoffs, but let's look at which teams were the most popular within each region. For the VCT 2024 Pacific Kickoff, ZETA DIVISION was the most popular team in the entire tournament at 321.5K Average Viewers. Japanese audiences are the most influential by far in the Pacific region, and it’s no wonder a Japanese roster was the tournament’s most popular team. The Grand Final match of the tournament could not even beat the peak viewership reached by ZETA on Day 3 of the event. Read also: VCT 2024: Pacific Kickoff becomes the game’s most popular event for the region ever The closest competitor to the Japanese roster of ZETA DIVISION was Global Esports, which ranked so highly thanks to their matches against ZETA. Global Esports was eliminated from the event with a 1-2 record after suffering two losses to ZETA. These two games both reached over 400K Peak Viewers and rank within the top 5 most popular matches of the whole tournament. In the VCT 2024 EMEA Kickoff, the Masters Tokyo champions retained their spot at the top: Fnatic was the most popular team with 265K Average Viewers. Fnatic were thought to be the best team in the world last year, although they were unable to claim victory at the ultimate championship event. Expectations were high and clearly, all fans had eyes for them at this recent Kickoff tournament. However, Ascension 2023 winners Gentle Mates received considerably high viewership for a newcomer team to the region. They were the second-most popular team of the tournament and may quickly take over to become the region’s most popular team throughout the upcoming 2024 season. The Gentle Mates esports organisation was founded by three famous French streamers, Squeezie, Gotaga, and Brawks; the team’s popularity is significantly boosted by this connection to the live-streaming community, and many community casters, including Squeezie himself, cover their games. Finally, the most popular team of the VCT 2024 China Kickoff was EDward Gaming. We cannot include viewership statistics from Chinese live-streaming platforms, as the data reported by these sites are unreliable and unfit for comparison. The Average Viewers figure in the graphic represents the viewership for Chinese teams based on viewership from Western live-streaming platforms. Most Popular VCT Kickoff 2024 Teams in Twitch Chats Another path to exploring the popularity of the VCT 2024 teams is their Twitch Chat popularity. For this, we collated the total mentions of each team across all official broadcasters for the Kickoff events, and also the total amount of chatters to mention a team. The reason for restricting this data to official broadcasters only is to avoid biased data, as we prefer to stick to the clean official broadcasters. Statistics from tarik’s channel will lean towards Sentinels as he is a part of their organization, and loud_coringa’s will naturally favour LOUD. Streamers of these sizes can drastically affect the data, and we are not aiming to measure which streamers’ Twitch Chat is the most active. Firstly, LOUD’s dominance is immediately clear once more. LOUD were the most-mentioned team across all Chats with 79.7K Mentions, and the team with the most chatters cheering them on. 7.4K individual Twitch accounts mentioned LOUD throughout the events, and these chatters were also the most active of all fans. On average, LOUD fans mentioned their team over 10 times each. Sentinels, despite being one of the most popular Valorant teams globally by average viewership, recorded only 2.6K Chatters who mentioned the team 7.9K times. Interestingly, G2 Esports and Sentinels exhibited similar popularity in Twitch chats, although G2 Esports was one of the least popular teams by average viewership. Tracking the Twitch mentions for each team, we can also observe which terms were most commonly combined with each team. A few interesting notes: Sentinels and MIBR are the only two teams to not be associated with “win”, DinoDance was the most popular Twitch emote to combine with these team names (used in copy-pastas), and Brazilian-Portuguese and Japanese-speaking fans are leading the way for Valorant. Excluding LOUD, the team with the most passionate fans is a close call between ZETA and MIBR. Both of these teams saw each individual name them a total of 5 times.

VCT 2024 Kickoff Most Popular Teams

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