Worlds 2021 Summary — Viewership Stats, Popular Languages and Platforms
The eleventh tournament in Worlds series, the 2021 World Championship, has shown record viewership statistics in League of Legends history and helped the discipline to become Twitch's most popular game by Peak Viewers. Esports Charts sums up the overall results of the tournament, compares it with the events of previous years and tells which platforms and languages were the most popular.
Disclaimer: statistics does not include data from Chinese streaming services, since they use other methods of measuring viewership activity at broadcasts.
Worlds 2021 Overall Statistics
Worlds 2021 was the first tournament among traditional console/PC disciplines to attract over 4 million concurrent viewers. Only Free Fire mobile game tournament (Free Fire World Series 2021 Singapore) has had a higher Peak Viewers number of 5.4 million spectators.
Before Worlds 2021 the record in the discipline by Peak Viewers was held by the 2019 World Championship, when T1 and G2 Esports met in the semifinal and attracted over 3.98M concurrent viewers. New record is only 1% higher.
The Average Viewers number at the event was nearly 1.3 million — an increase of 16.5% compared with the last tournament in the series. It is noteworthy that Worlds 2021 was only the seventh esports tournament in history with an Average Viewers number of more than a million spectators — along with two previous Worlds, two Free Fire and two Fortnite tournaments.
In total, viewers spent more than 174.8 million hours watching Worlds 2021, which was broadcasted for 134 hours. This is the highest result among all tournaments. Worlds 2021 outpaced the previous leader (Worlds 2020) by almost 25% according to this metric.
It is noteworthy that the statistics of the last World Championship grew much higher than when comparing Worlds 2020 with the 2019 event — the increase there was only 2%. However, the viewership dynamics were not as impressive as when comparing Worlds 2019 and 2018 — the increase in Hours Watched there was 66%.
Stage comparison of Worlds 2021
Comparing Worlds 2021 with last year's World Championship, there was a commensurate increase in the Play-In and Play-Off viewership by stages. In terms of Hours Watched, the World Championship 2021 outpaced the previous one by 13% and 18%, respectively.
At the same time, the group stage of Worlds 2021 was noticeably more popular with viewers than during the previous World Championship — the increase in Hours Watched was over 39%. This is mainly due to the fact that for the first time in two years one of the most popular teams in the world, T1, played in the tournament. T1 started from the group stage, and its first match against DetonatioN FocusMe reached more than 2.2 million Peak Viewers.
Platforms Statistics
The most popular platform for watching Worlds 2021 was Twitch, which accounted for more than 73% of the total Hours Watched of the event. Unlike previous tournaments, YouTube's percentage dropped to only 20.9%, because there were no Korean streams on the platform: local fans could have only followed the tournament on Twitch or Afreeca TV: the latter one took 3rd place among the platforms with 5% of Hours Watched from the total number.
Twitch's total Hours Watched share of Worlds has grown significantly compared with past tournament series. In 2021, it was 128.4 million HW, an 83% increase compared with 2020. At the same time, YouTube's share dropped 40% compared with last year, and it was also behind the 2019 event regarding Hours Watched.
Worlds 2021 Statistics by Languages
Traditionally, the most popular languages of League of Legends World Championship broadcasts are English and Korean — in 2021 they also took first and second place, respectively. However, compared with the previous event of the series, the Peak Viewers number of English-language broadcasts increased slightly (by 2%, amounting to 1.18 million Peak Viewers), but Korean broadcasts dropped by 23.5% in PV.
Compared with Worlds 2020, the Spanish-speaking audience was significantly more active at the 2021 tournament. The language was third in the tournament in terms of Peak Viewers, totaling a discipline-record 569K people — 2.5 times more than at last year's Worlds. The growth is related to several factors: firstly, Spanish player Elyoya from MAD Lions qualified for the playoffs and viewers followed the games of the but; secondly, fans of LoL from LATAM were very active throughout the event, who mostly followed the event on lolesports site.
Teams from the Vietnamese league didn't play in the World Championship for the second year in a row (due to internal restrictions caused by COVID-19), but the language still made it to the top 4 languages by Peak Viewers on broadcasts — 471.5 K spectators. However, this is almost 30% less than last year: back in 2020 Suning with the Vietnamese jungler SofM played in the final, but this year there were no players from Vietnam at Worlds.
Previously, we mentioned the most popular Worlds 2021 teams and summed up the final's results, in which DWG KIA was defeated by EDward Gaming and failed to defend the title. Want to know more? Subscribe to PRO & start researching now!
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