During the pandemic, Riot Games hosted the first international offline tournament. The company gathered the world’s strongest teams at the World Championship in China. There, they competed for the Summoners' Cup, and you can learn about the audience’s reaction from our blog.
The group stage and playoffs of the 2020 LoL World Championship took place on October 3-31. During these, the world’s 16 best teams first clashed in four groups, after which the eight best ones continued their battles in the single-elimination brackets. Suning and DAMWON faced each other in the finals, fighting for the champion’s title. The victory went to DAMWON Gaming, which has finally succeeded in returning the Summoner’s Cup to Korea after two years of failing to do so. It should be reminded that we’ve already covered the preliminary stage and the groups.
First, let’s take a quick look at the overall results of LoL Worlds 2020. These show that the viewability indicators aren’t that much different from those of 2019. This year’s peak viewers indicator reached 3.8 million viewers, which is a 2.6% decrease compared to the last World Cup. Meanwhile, the average viewers indicator grew by 6.8%.
In case of talking just about the main stage, this year’s tournament doesn’t fare that well, with the overall results of the stage decreasing by a few percent. The average viewers indicator also just lost a total of 1.19%.
It should be noted that two matches of this year's World Championship’s main part are among the discipline’s top 5 most viewed matches. The final match of Suning vs. DAMWON became the second most viewed (3.8 million peak viewers), while the semifinal match of G2 vs. DAMWON became the discipline’s fourth most viewed match (2.7 million peak viewers).
A large decrease in peak viewers indicator was shown by the English language. Compared to the previous championship, 13.6% of this indicator was lost. The western teams can be seen as the reason for such underwhelming news, considering that only Fnatic and G2 Esports made it to the playoffs. The former was stopped in its tracks during the quarterfinals, while the “samurai” suffered a defeat during the semifinals. Despite this, English remains the most popular language of the stage.
Considering the peak viewers marks reached, the Vietnamese language sure stands out. In 2020, it reached 668 thousand peak viewers, which is 54% more compared to last year’s indicator. The Korean language also showed a slight growth, reaching 2.1% more peak viewers compared to its result from the previous LoL Worlds.
Moreover, the mark of 668 thousand peak viewers is nearly the best result across all the channels, being outmatched only by the official Riot Games channel on Twitch, which gathered just one thousand peak viewers more on its broadcast.
These two languages also influenced the popularity of the platforms, with YouTube further overtaking its rival Twitch and making for a 24.4% worth gap between the two. YouTube’s peak viewers mark was also 5.4% higher than the one at LoL Worlds 2019, while Twitch’s one decreased by 5%.
DAMWON Gaming became the most popular team in the playoffs, its matches gathering 2.2 million average viewers. The second spot goes to the tournament’s other finalist – Suning, with its 2 million average viewers.
You can find other analyzes of the performance of 2020 LoL World Championship at this page. Additionally, subscribe to our social network pages to keep being one of the first to learn about our new articles.
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