EDward Gaming broke the curse while Worlds 2021 broke viewership records on Twitch and in esports
One of the biggest esports events in history has ended — the League of Legends World Championship (Worlds 2021). The significance of the event is confirmed not so much by the pop stars who performed before the final or the post-match premiere of the game’s series on Netflix, but by the audience activity: the championship turned set records not only within esports, but also on the largest Western game streaming platform Twitch.
EDward Gaming passed the quarterfinal for the 1st time — and instantly won the title
Chinese team EDward Gaming has been performing at the highest level in League of Legends since 2014. It has a lot of LPL titles, as well as victories at Rift Rivals and even at the Mid-Season Invitational 2015. But until 2021, the team did not manage to get past the first round of the playoffs at the World Championship — and the team didn’t even qualify for the last two Worlds.
In the Worlds finals, the Chinese team was opposed by the formidable DWG KIA. In pre-match predictions, most commentators and analysts agreed that DK would become the second team after T1 to win two Worlds in a row, but the favorite failed: the final score was 3:2 and the championship cup returned to China again.
We should also mention the Chinese LoL fans. It was already deep after midnight in China when the decisive map ended, but this did not stop local fans from taking to the streets, yelling and celebrating the victory of their favorite team.
Worlds 2021 Finals Viewership Records
The decisive match of Worlds 2020 attracted fewer spectators than the semifinals of 2019. In 2021, Riot Games did everything to attract as many viewers to the screens as possible — and it succeeded.
Until the final moments of the last map, Worlds 2021 could not gain 4 million viewers at peak, but it still happened! The total number of concurrent viewers was set at 4,018,728 — this is a new record for League of Legends esports and all non-mobile disciplines (only Free Fire World Series 2021 Singapore is placed higher with 5.4 million Peak Viewers).
The Worlds 2021 Finals also set a new Twitch record among categories. During the finals, the number of viewers of League of Legends on the platform reached 3.08 million — thus the MOBA bypassed the Special Events category (3.06 million), which became the leader in the summer of 2020 during the presentation of the PlayStation 5 games.
The finals also updated the peak viewer records on the largest regional Twitch channels of League of Legends. Among them are the main English-language channels of the game riotgames (882K Peak Viewers), LCK_Korea (635K), CBLOL (282K) and LLA (306K).
In addition, Worlds 2021 became the most popular esports tournament in terms of the total number of hours viewers spent watching streams of the event. The total Hours Watched number reached 174.8M, which is 25% more than Worlds 2020, which is ranked second by this metric.
What’s also interesting is that during the decisive Worlds 2021 match, League of Legends esports records were updated on regional broadcasts. Peak numbers were updated on Spanish (569.3K Peak Viewers), Italian (42.6K) and Hungarian (15.K) broadcasts.
In the near future, Esports Charts will summarize the detailed results of the tournament and talk about the most popular teams, platforms and languages of broadcasts, as well as how the audience of the event grew from stage to stage. In the meantime, subscribe to our social networks to not miss a single announcement.
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