What led to lower viewership of LPL Spring 2023 Group Stage?

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One of China’s top League of Legends events, the LPL Spring 2023, saw the end of its first phase on March 26. This event has the longest Group Stage among all the regional leagues; despite that, its viewership could not match the corresponding numbers from the previous split tournament, although there were extenuating circumstances for that.

After ten weeks of action, the LPL Spring 2023 Playoffs brackets have been set, with ThunderTalk Gaming versus Royal Never Give Up and Top Esports versus Team WE being the two Upper Bracket Round 1 matches. In the Upper Bracket Round 2, Bilibili Gaming and Oh My God await the winners of these two series, respectively.

Weibo Gaming and LNG Esports have made the Upper Bracket Quarterfinals, while JD Gaming and EDward Gaming await in the Upper Bracket Semifinals. After the formalities of all these meetings, the Grand Final will take place on April 15, with the winner pocketing ¥2,000,000 and the runner-up receiving ¥1,000,000, while both will book their berths in the Mid-Season Invitational (MSI 2023).

LPL Spring 2023 gets the season off to a slow start

Viewership numbers from Chinese streaming platforms are not included due to unreliability of data they provide

The League of Legends competition did 7.52M Hours Watched, 88K Peak Viewers, and 23K Average Viewers, with the peak match being between the Week 4, Day 6 match-up between JD Gaming and Weibo Gaming. These two were also the most popular teams in terms of HW and AV across the Group Stage.

  Basic viewership stats and other dynamics from the LPL Spring 2023 Group Stage   

Compared to the previous split, the LPL Summer 2022, these numbers fell by 41.1%, 33.2%, and 34.3%, respectively. This can be attributed to the fact that there were no more live streams of the games on popular platforms like Nimo TV or the official LPL Vietnam YouTube channel, which is an important market for this competition.

Also, with a lack of live broadcasts in Korean — another vital market — on AfreecaTV, the number of viewers dropped. An interesting point about this tournament is that alongside the eventual winners, there will be another side heading to the MSI 2023 this time; so, perhaps, audiences were slowly warming up to the big-ticket event before turning up for the latter games.

The official LPL channels on Twitch and YouTube were the two most popular for streaming the event, followed by Caedrel — a LOL pro and analyst for Riot Games. It is well known that the Brit is a popular figure in the Chinese region, and his broadcasts usually attract quite a lot of eyeballs from that region.

English was the most popular language during the Group Stage of the LPL Spring 2023, taking up almost 96% of the total share. The subsequent two languages were Vietnamese and Chinese, taking up 2.1% and 1.3% of the viewership pie.

Again, with the non-availability of streams on platforms like Nimo TV, AfreecaTV, and the official LPL Vietnam YouTube channel, the viewership numbers of languages more local to the competition like Vietnamese and Korean took massive hits. At the previous League of Legends event, the former had a share of 19.4%, while the latter grabbed 11.61% of the total watch hours, showing how far they fell without the support of the usual broadcasts.

That English takes up such a large share of the audience numbers can be attributed to the fact that Twitch was the dominant choice of platform for most fans, taking up 76.3% of the total share. YouTube grabbed a bit more than a fifth of the share at 21.4%.

The season has just started, and things are slowly heating up as the LPL Spring 2023 enters its latter stages. With the Playoffs starting on March 30, the sides who have reached this far will look to give their best and take advantage of the fact that the top two will be allowed to book their berth in an event as prestigious as the Mid-Season Invitational 2023.