Valorant Champions 2022 — statistics on community casting, broadcast languages, and audience overlap with other tournaments

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On September 18, Valorant Champions 2022, the biggest event in the discipline, ended in Istanbul. The Brazilian team LOUD became the champion of the tournament that featured a $1 million prize pool, and the event itself set a new discipline record for concurrent viewership. That was covered in our earlier article about the tournament results. Now we will analyze in more detail the broadcast languages, community casting and the audience overlap with other tournaments. 

Languages

The most popular language of the Valorant Champions 2022 broadcasts is English — it accumulated 26.6 million Hours Watched, or 43.8% of the total. As for the Average Viewers number, this metric is almost the same as last year's world championship, with slightly more than 230K AV (-0.3%). The English-language broadcasts were the most popular on Day 1 and during the final.

Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish are also in the Top 5 most popular languages of the tournament. Moreover, Japanese and Portuguese saw their AV numbers increase by +67% and +70% compared to the last World Championship. Interestingly, the AV number on the Japanese broadcasts rose at ZETA DIVISION matches, so on Day 5 of the group stage the Japanese broadcasts even outperformed the English broadcast by Average Viewers. No other language managed to do this. The Portuguese broadcasts were especially popular at LOUD games and the Spanish broadcasts attracted the highest Peak Viewers number at the KRU Esports and Leviatan Esports games.

Several broadcast languages at Valorant Champions 2022 set records for Peak Viewers within the discipline. The PV number on the Portuguese-language broadcasts went from 353.4K (set at VCT 2022 Stage 1 Masters Reykjavik) to 452.2K PV, up 27%. The PV number at the Korean broadcast exceeded its last year's record (set at VCT 2021 Korea Stage 3 Challengers Playoffs) by 206%. We should also note new records reached in Indonesian, German and Finnish as well.

Twitch and YouTube also set their own records within the discipline. The PV number at Valorant Champions 2022 on Amazon platform was 1.1 million people (+24.8% from the previous record) and YouTube increased its record within Valorant esports to 313K PV (+38.8%).

Community Casting and Official Broadcasts

The proportion of community casting and official broadcasts at Valorant Champions 2022 hardly changed compared with the last tournament — they are 50.9% and 49.1%, respectively. At the same time, the PV number of the community casters increased by 6.2% from last year's championship, and by 33.7% regarding the official broadcasts.

Note: the Hours Watched number that community casters accumulated exceeded this same metric for the official broadcasts almost throughout the entire tournament. The exceptions are the end of the group stage, when Tarik did not launch his broadcast, and the final of the tournament, which most viewers preferred to watch on the official channels.

The most popular Valorant Champions 2022 broadcast channel is the official Valorant channel on Twitch. It accumulated 9.2 million HW, 15.2% of the total. The English-language Valorant YouTube channel is in second place among official channels, with Japanese broadcast channels on Twitch and YouTube in third and fourth place in the same ranking — all these channels accounted for 5% of the total.

As for community casting, Tarik's broadcast attracted the most viewers — the American amassed 7.7 million HW (12.8% of the total) and his broadcast saw a PV number of 148.8K people. Other Top 5 community-casters include fps_shaka and jasper7se from Japan, as well as shroud from Canada.

Top Teams and Top Matches

The most popular Valorant Champions 2022 team is LOUD — it showed the best result in AV number (727.4K people). OpTic Gaming comes in second place (717K AV). It is interesting that apart from the finalists of the tournament, Paper Rex, Edward Gaming and ZETA DIVISION are also in the Top 5 of the ranking. These three teams didn't show the best result in the tournament (they didn't manage to get higher than 9-12 places).

The most popular match of the tournament is the final between LOUD and OpTic Gaming — it drew more than 1.5 million Peak Viewers, and the AV number of the series is 1.2 million people. More than a million Peak Viewers was also recorded in the lower bracket final, where OpTic Gaming played against DRX. Interestingly, the fourth most popular match of the tournament is the game between Paper Rex and Edward Gaming on Day 1.

Tournament Audience on Twitch

More than 31.2% of Valorant Champions 2022 viewers also watched last year's World Championship (948K Unique Authorized Viewers). A more detailed comparison of audiences on the official channels shows that the recent tournament in Istanbul attracted more Unique Authorized Viewers (+11%) and Unique Viewers on Twitch (+10%) than Valorant Champions 2021. At the same time, Valorant Champions 2022 saw a slight decrease in the percentage of active chatters (-5.6%), albeit a slight increase in the number of messages they sent (+1.6%).

The increase in the number of Authorized and Unique Viewers is explained by the finalists' lineups. OpTic Gaming and LOUD are very popular organizations not only in Valorant, but also outside the discipline. The first represented North America and brought local viewers together in the finals, while the second represented Brazil and the Portuguese-speaking fan community. If the finals had featured teams from one or less popular regions, it would not have sparked such a high audience reach.  

We also found out which of the recently ended or ongoing esports events had the biggest audience overlap with Valorant Champions 2022. Approximately 12% of viewers also watched LEC Summer 2022 and ESL Pro League Season 16. There is a slightly less overlap with LCS Summer 2022. RLCS 2021-22 World Championship and regional qualifiers for The International 2022 in Western Europe come next.

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Valorant Champions 2022's audience reach has grown considerably compared with last year's World Championships, indicating a steady growth in the discipline's popularity. The discipline's multinationality plays a major role in this: English is still the main broadcast language, and the most popular community casters are from the United States and Canada. It is also important to note that the Valorant tournament has a large audience overlap with LEC and LCS — the Western League of Legends franchise leagues. This demonstrates the Riot Games credibility with viewers and the company's established general fan base of its games. When the company introduces a hybrid franchise format to Valorant in 2023, the shooter's audience reach could increase even more.