Faker claims 4th World Championship title at the most popular esports event ever
Perhaps the main esports tournament of the year, the 2023 World Championship, has come to an end in Seoul. Seven years later, Faker and T1 won their fourth championship title, beating Weibo Gaming in the final with a score of 3:0. More than 6 million people concurrently watched the decisive match of the championship, which became an absolute record in the history of esports.
Before the start of the grand final, Riot Games traditionally held a colorful closing ceremony and also introduced a new League of Legends hero. The fans, judging by the feedback on social networks, were delighted with the pre-match show: all this resulted in the tournament breaking the industry record for a one-time audience already on the first map of the grand final.
At its peak, Worlds 2023 attracted over 6.4 million people: the first tournament in the world to surpass the 6 million concurrent viewers mark. The previous achievement, which belonged to Free Fire World Series 2021 Singapore, was improved by more than a million (!) viewers.
If we consider only the Worlds series, the current World Championship has improved the previous series record for concurrent viewers by 24.3%. The five most popular events include the last five tournaments in the series, three of which received more than 4 million concurrent viewers.
Top-5 Most Popular Worlds:
- Worlds 2023 — 6.4 million Peak Viewers;
- Worlds 2022 — 5.1 million Peak Viewers;
- Worlds 2021 — 4 million Peak Viewers;
- Worlds 2019 — 3.9 million Peak Viewers;
- Worlds 2020 — 3.8 million Peak Viewers.
Interestingly, Worlds 2023 failed to achieve a new record in terms of total watch time. The tournament took second place in the overall ranking of esports events by metric, behind Worlds 2021, which totaled 174.8 million hours of watch time.
In addition to the overall record, the event also had some notable achievements. Thus, esports audience record was set on a very important platform for League of Legends: AfreecaTV:
- New AfreecaTV Esports Peak — 534.5K Peak Viewers (previous record: 511.7K PV at Worlds 2022).
In addition, the League of Legends esports audience record on YouTube was updated: 3.2 million Peak Viewers (previous record: 2 million PV at Worlds 2020).
Even more impressive are the language records set at the tournament. Worlds recorded the largest audience for Korean, English, and Vietnamese broadcasts in all of esports:
- New Korean esports viewership record: 2 million Peak Viewers;
- New English esports viewership record: 1.69 million Peak Viewers;
- New Vietnamese esports viewership record: 805.3K Peak Viewers.
The event also reached highest-ever Japanese LoL viewership of 155K Peak Viewers. Overall record of the language is 581K at Vtuber Most Cooperatitive Tournament #4 (Apex Legends competition).
Worlds 2023 was phenomenally able to improve the statistics of last year's tournament, and there are several key reasons for this. Soon we will overview the exact factors that helped Worlds 2023 to achieve such phenomenal viewership results. Stay tuned!
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