Worlds 2021 has started — and it’s already getting more viewers compared to last year

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Worlds 2021 is the most anticipated League of Legends tournament of the year that kicked off on October 5th. The Play-In matches have just begun, but the event is already showing better viewership results compared to the same stage of the previous World Championship.

Unlike the 2020 season, this year Riot Games has revised regional quotas in the first stage of the tournament. The team from LCK got into the Play-In stage again, and this gave the championship a serious viewership boost on the first day of the tournament.

In the debut match of Worlds 2021, the LCK representative Hanwha Life Esports faced LNG Esports, a team from LPL. Over 1.29 million people watched the match at peak, this is 130K more spectators than was recorded in the most popular match of the first day of Play-In at Worlds 2020: back then 1.16 million spectators followed the game of Team Liquid against MAD Lions.

The most popular match of Play-In day 1 was the game between Hanwha Life Esports and the Infinity team: it was watched by up to 1,303,203 concurrent viewers (12.3% growth compared to the most popular match of Play-In day 1 of Worlds 2020). After the Korean team finished their matches, the local audience began to gradually leave the broadcasts, but the audience of the majority of remaining games (besides UoL vs Galatasaray) still was over a million concurrent viewers!

Note that Riot Games traditionally gives away in-game items, including hero icons, emotions and other rewards during Worlds. As usual, this significantly increases the activity of viewers on broadcasts.

Worlds 2021: Complete Viewership Statistics of the Event