Worlds 2022 — Group Stage viewership statistics

The last group stage matches of 2022 World Championship ended on October 16. Teams from South Korea and China dominated the teams from Europe and North America. When it comes to viewership, the audience reach decreased by 40% compared to last year's World Championship. Esports Charts team has summed up the intermediate results of the main League of Legends tournament of the year.

Group Stage Results

Teams from South Korea and China proved to be the most successful ones in the Worlds 2022 Group Stage. T1, DRX, DAMWON Gaming, Gen.G Esports, EDward Gaming, JD Gaming and Royal Never Give Up will compete in the playoffs. They will be joined by Rogue, the LEC Summer 2022 champion and the only non-Asian playoff participant. It should be noted that on the way to the final stage of the tournament, the European team defeated the Chinese team Top Esports, the only team from the LPL, which failed to qualify from the group.

Representatives of Europe and North America can hardly take credit for the tournament. While Fnatic won only two maps, Cloud9, G2 Esports, Evil Geniuses and 100 Thieves played even worse: each of them won only one map out of six. GAM Esports from Vietnam and CTBC Flying Oyster from Taiwan performed similarly.

Viewership Statistics

Statistics from Chinese streaming services is not included due to unreliability of data they provide

2022 World Championship matches accumulated over 46.5 million Hours Watched in the Group Stage. The Average Viewers number was 826K, with the Peak Viewers number reaching 1.39 million concurrent viewers (at the match between T1 and Fnatic on the Group Stage Day 2). All major metrics dropped significantly, by 37-41%, compared to the Group Stage of last year's World Championship.

The most popular channel of the stage is the official English-language Riot Games channel on Twitch, which totaled 15.6 million HW. Second place also goes to the English-language channel, LoL Esports on YouTube. We should remind you that last year, the channel LCK_Korea was in second place, but now it is only in seventh place by Hours Watched. The main reason is the inconvenient schedule for viewers from South Korea.

The most popular team in the Group Stage is T1. Its matches were watched by over a million Average Viewers. Interestingly, only teams from Group A (T1 and its opponents) made it to the top of the leaderboard. It is obvious that the popularity of the Korean team influenced the results of the Cloud9, Fnatic & EDward Gaming. As for the most popular team from the other groups, it is DAMWON Gaming, its AV number is 15% lower than that of T1.

There is still enough time until the end of the tournament, but we one can clearly observe some disappointing trends. First, the AV number in all major broadcast languages dropped significantly. The least decrease in metrics is in English (-5%), but Korean (-63%) and Portuguese (-42%) lost a lot. This is primarily due to inconvenient time zones for Asian viewers. At the same time, the majority of playoff participants are from South Korea, one of the most active regions on the professional League of Legends stage not only in terms of results, but also in terms of audience reach.

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The 2022 World Championship playoffs kick off from October 20 to November 5. The quarterfinals are hosted by Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York City, the semifinals take place at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, and the deciding game are held at the Chase Center in San Francisco. The following matches will be played in the first round of the playoffs:

20.10: JD Gaming vs. Rogue;
21.10: T1 vs Royal Never Give Up;
22.10: Gen.G Esports vs. DAMWON Gaming;
23.10: DRX vs Edward Gaming.