VCT 2022 Last Chance Qualifiers overview — Sentinels' failure and EDward Gaming's surprising triumph

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The final qualifiers for the VALORANT Champions 2022 ended on August 14. There were six winners in the last chance regional qualifiers in North and South America, Europe, East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. Esports Charts sums up the results of the final qualifying stage for the world championship.

Tournament results

100Thieves won the only quota in qualifiers for North America, defeating The Guard 3-0 in the final. Unfortunately for American fans, both Cloud9 and Sentinels will be out of the world championship. Unfortunately for Shroud, who decided to quit streaming for a while and return to his esports career, he didn't become Sentinel's savior.

Team Liquid won the European qualifiers, defeating Russian team M3 Champions in the final with the score of 3:1. Third place went to G2 Esports, while Acend was the biggest disappointment of the region: the European team won VALORANT Champions 2021, but failed to qualify for the upcoming world championship. It seems that the reshuffling of the lineup has done more harm than good.

Shroud | Sentinels

One of the biggest sensations of the stage happened in the qualifier for East Asia. The Chinese team EDward Gaming, which had almost never played in a big international tournament before, suddenly showed up without losing a single map to any of the opponents. As a result, Japanese fans will not be able to cheer for Crazy Raccoon or Northeption at the upcoming championship.

The participants in South America fought for two quotas for VALORANT Champions 2022. KRÜ Esports and FURIA Esports, one of the strongest teams in the region, expectedly became the winners. BOOM Esports from Indonesia won the Last Chance qualifier in the APAC region (Asia-Pacific). BOOM beat ONIC Esports 3-1 in the final.

Viewership statistics

VCT 2022: North America Last Chance Qualifier was the most popular Last Chance qualifier. It accumulated more than 9.6 million Hours Watched, 218.7K Average Viewers and 631.6K Peak Viewers. For comparison, these numbers on average were three times higher than numbers the American stage of the Last Chance qualifier showed in 2021. That qualifying event attracted more viewers than some of the regional tournaments. World championship qualifiers accumulated more Hours Watched than VCT 2022: EMEA Stage 2 Challengers and VCT 2021 North America Stage 1 Masters.

The most popular NA Last Chance Qualifiers match was the series between the Sentinels and The Guard, which took place on the first game day. The Sentinels matches generated 4.5 million Hours Watched in total, which was the best result among the other teams. Meanwhile, the shroud team's tournament results leave much to be desired. Sentinels won the VCT 2021: Stage 2 Masters in Reykjavik in 2021, and after that its results plummeted. The team finished at 9-12 place at the VALORANT Championships 2021 and failed to get higher than 7-8 place at the NA Challengers series tournaments in 2022.

Speaking about broadcasts, the most popular language was English — 595.8K Peak Viewers. The vast majority of viewers followed the tournament on Twitch — 560K vs 70K on YouTube. Some viewers also followed the event on Facebook Gaming (less than 2K ACV).

Tarik became the most popular community streamer, his Last Chance Qualifier broadcasts accumulated more than 3.1 million Hours Watched and peaked at 196K concurrent viewers. Shroud ranked second by this metric (after the official valorant channel). While the Canadian streamer played for Sentinels, his girlfriend streamed his matches on his channel. As a result, she generated over a 1 million Hours Watched with 81.9K Peak Viewers.

The European Last Chance qualifier matches accumulated 4.8 million Hours Watched. The Average Viewers number reached 111K and Peak Viewers number reached 216K. During the same event of 2021, the figures were slightly lower: 3.1 million Hours Watched and 175.5K Peak Viewers. 

The match between Team Liquid and M3 in the Grand Final attracted the most fan attention. Team Liquid itself was the most-watched team in the tournament, accumulating more than 2 million Hours Watched.

The official valorant channel was the most popular streaming channel in European qualifier. It accumulated 1.7 million Hours Watched and 97.7K Peak Viewers. The Spanish channel lvpes2 took second place by audience reach, it generated 563K Hours Watched and 41.2K Peak Viewers. However, the Turkish streamer wtcn had an even higher figure by Peak Viewers, 72.2K.

Peak Viewers numbers in English-language broadcasts were 146.2K. Turkish (77.9K) and Spanish (65.4K) were also in the top 3 most popular languages of qualifier. Peak Viewers on the Russian-language stream was 12.2K. As in North America, the majority of Europeans chose to watch the qualifier on Twitch — 174K Peak Viewers against 41.8K on YouTube.

East Asia was the third most watched region ampng Last Chance Qualifiers. Local matches accumulated 4.1 million Hours Watched in total, as well as reached 95.6K Average Viewers and 214K Peak Viewers. The most watched match here was the one between EDward Gaming and Northeption. The latter was also the most watched team of the tournament (1.78 million Hours Watched). For comparison, EDward Gaming accumulated just over 1 million Hours Watched.

Japanese was the most popular broadcast language during qualifiers. Peak Viewers numbers on the Japanese broadcasts was 167K viewers. English was the second most popular language (37.7K), while Korean ranked third (10.2K). In contrast to North America and Europe, in East Asia the proportion between the platforms was not as significant, 150K viewers on Twitch vs 68.6K viewers on YouTube.

Most popular VCT 2022 Last Chance Qualifiers by PV & AV

In the remaining two regions, the figures were even more modest. Matches in South America accumulated 2.4 million Hours Watched and 155.9K Peak Viewers. The series between KRÜ Esports and FURIA Esports in the final of the upper bracket had the most viewers. 

The audience reach in the Asia-Pacific region was 1.9 million Hours Watched with 85.3K Peak Viewers. ONIC Esports vs BOOM Esports became the most popular match there.

To summarize, Last Chance qualifiers in 2022 attracted more viewers than the matches of LCQ in 2021. The biggest growth was observed in North America, where the main metrics increased 3-4 times. In other regions the growth was not as big. The only region where the number of viewers dropped was APAC — the key metrics were 1.5-2 times higher in 2021 than in 2022.

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The VALORANT Champions 2022 tournament will take place on September 2-18 in Istanbul. 16 teams from seven regions will take part, including FunPlus Phoenix, champions of the last Masters series tournament in Copenhagen. Riot Games has not yet announced the prize pool and format of the championship.