A retrospective look at Worlds viewership — how the largest event in esports came to be
The 2023 Season World Championship for League of Legends will take place in South Korea, starting on the 10th of October. The Worlds event has been the most-watched event in esports of every year since 2016, according to our database. Before the final event of the 2023 season kicks off, let’s look through some of the highlights and viewership milestones of the event over the past years.
With over a month of action planned for Worlds, the event will dominate esports viewership during its runtime. Here at Esports Charts, we have detailed viewership data for every Worlds event since 2016, and every year since then has been a highlight for the event’s viewership in a different manner.
Worlds Viewership Milestones
For a quick overview of the power of Worlds’ viewership, take a look at some of the biggest milestones and records that Worlds has achieved over the years.
Worlds holds the record for the most popular esports event in multiple languages; English, Korean, and Vietnamese. All of these records were achieved by the Worlds 2022 event, the most popular Worlds to date. Worlds was also the most popular esports event across multiple years in these languages, from 2020-2022 for English audiences, from 2016-2017 and 2019-2022 for Korean, and 2020 and 2022 for Vietnamese.
Worlds has also set multiple records as the biggest esports event of the year on multiple live-streaming platforms, such as YouTube, Twitch, and AfreecaTV. Worlds was the most popular esports event on YouTube three years in a row, 2016-2018, before disciplines such as Garena Free Fire and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang became hugely popular on the platform.
Worlds was the most popular esports event on Twitch for four years in a row between 2019 and 2022, and the Worlds 2022 event was the most popular esports event broadcast on Twitch of all time, thanks to its 2.98M PV. On AfreecaTV, a Korean live-streaming platform, Worlds was the most popular esports event of 2021 and 2022. Worlds 2022’s Peak Viewers of 511K on AfreecaTV remains the most popular esports event ever for the platform.
Worlds Viewership Evolution (2016-2022)
Although not the first ever Worlds event held, Worlds 2016 marks the first year for which detailed viewership statistics are available in our database. The event reached 22.9M hours of watch time and recorded a peak concurrent viewership figure of 1.62M. Although by modern standards this is lower than we would expect from an international event the size of Worlds, it was the most-watched and most popular esports event of 2016.
In recent years, the Worlds event has routinely achieved more than 100M hours of watch time, and this explosive growth compared to 2016 is not only due to the discipline growing in popularity. 2017 marked the introduction of the Play-In stage to the Worlds event, and the format of the tournament was restructured to allow for more action and airtime.
Comparing 2016 to 2017, the Worlds event increased its broadcasting time by almost 100 hours. The new format which allowed for much longer broadcasting times, coupled with the growing popularity of the discipline saw the event transform itself in terms of watch-time. In 2016, Worlds was the most-watched event of the year with 6.5M Hours Watched more than the second-most-watched event, and by 2017 this gap had grown to 29.3M HW.
2017 and 2018 were solid years for Worlds, but Worlds 2019 is when the single largest growth in viewership was experienced. 2019 was the first year since 2015 that the event was held in Europe, which may have helped the event to be more accessible to an international audience. In 2018, when the event was held in South Korea, matches would go live at 5pm local time, or 4am for any American fans on the East Coast. The inverse is true for Asian fans who hoped to spectate the 2016 Worlds event, which was held in the United States. Europe presented a middle-ground compromise for these two large regions.
2019 was a wildly successful year for the discipline, as the Worlds event grew by over 54M hours of watch time in a single year, finally breaking the 100M hours of watch time milestone. Not only the first-ever esports event to reach more than 100M HW, it was also the first esports event in history to record more than 1M concurrent viewers on average throughout its airtime.
Another key advantage for the 2019 tournament’s viewership was being held outside of Korea. 2018 was a poor year for Korean teams at the Worlds event, and this likely had an impact on Korean viewership, however, many die-hard Korean League of Legends fans also likely preferred to spectate the event in person rather than through a live stream. With Korean team T1 back in top form and Korean fans more likely to spectate the event online rather than in person, the event’s Korean Peak Viewers figure rose by 350% compared to 2018 and solidified the Semi-Finals match featuring T1 as the most popular match of the event.
2020 was another quiet year for Worlds viewership. Compared to 2019, viewership did not experience any growth but it also did not decline. Viewership between these two years remained stable; the calm before the storm that was to come in 2021. 2021 was the most successful year ever in League of Legends history, and the Worlds 2021 event became the most-watched esports event ever, a record still held to this day.
2021 set multiple records in terms of esports viewership; it became the most-watched event by Hours Watched and also recorded the highest Average Viewers figure to date, 1.29M viewers. Although it became the first-ever Worlds event to reach more than 4M viewers at peak, it was not the first esports event to record this. Earlier in 2021, the Free Fire World Series held in Singapore reached 5.4M concurrent viewers at peak, stealing a viewership record away from Worlds.
The 2021 Worlds event was held in Iceland and continued the trend of European Worlds events being hugely successful in terms of viewership. The 2020 Worlds event was held in China, and although viewership was stable compared to the previous year, the event’s lack of growth in viewership could be considered a lull. 2021’s return to Europe saw the event record 174.8M hours of watch time, a still unbeaten record.
Although 2022 was unable to beat the watch time recorded by the previous year, the event did record the highest Peak Viewers figure in Worlds history, more than 5.14M viewers. The 2022 Worlds featured an all-Korean Grand Final, as fan favourites T1 faced off against DRX for the grand prize. In the end, DRX was able to topple their rivals and claim their first Worlds title. Well over 1M Korean-speaking fans tuned in for the final match of the event, on top of even more English-speaking viewers.
Looking at the viewership of all Worlds events since 2016, League of Legends has been on a steady upward trajectory for the past 7 years. Although 2022 was unable to match the explosive growth in watch time that the 2021 event recorded, it was able to set an all-new Peak Viewers record for the series.
Thinking back on the history of Worlds viewership, it's hard to imagine another record that could be set by the event series. The Worlds event series has solidified itself as the biggest event series in esports viewership, and its own growth and records may be impossible to beat for many years.
As we looked at in a previous article where we compared League of Legend’s pre-Worlds viewership of 2023 and 2022, viewership for this year is slightly down compared to 2022. However, many of the drops in viewership in larger and more established regions were offset by growth in the smaller and still developing regions. It may be that the growing audiences around the World will help League of Legends reach a new height in 2023.
The only way to know if 2023 will be a successful year for Worlds viewership is to keep on top of the data with Esports Charts. Keep an eye out for articles covering the viewership of the event as it progresses, or analyse the data yourself on our tournament page.
Detailed Esports data at your fingertips.
Subscribe to & start exploring!
