Valorant Champions 2023 breaks 1M peak concurrent viewers on Day 6 of the Playoffs — 14.9% increase from 2022
After the Lower Bracket Quarterfinals match where Fnatic defeated DRX, the Valorant Champions 2023 event gave its competitors a much-needed break. No matches were played between Monday and Wednesday of this week, but Ludwig did use this break to host the biggest Valorant crew battle event ever. On Thursday the 24th, the event returned to live-streaming for the Upper Bracket Final and Lower Bracket Semifinal. These are two of the final four matches of the event, and hype is building up for the tournament as it continues towards its climax.
Playoffs Day 6 Viewership Statistics
Day 6 of the Playoffs stage for this year marked the first match of the event to break the 1M concurrent viewers mark. Comparing the statistics for the 2023 event to its 2022 predecessor, viewership is almost entirely on the rise. The 2023 Champions event garnered 5.79M hours of watch time throughout its 8-hour run, an increase of 72.3% from last year. It’s worth noting that the 2022 Champions event hosted the same matches as the 2023 version, Upper Bracket Final and Lower Bracket Semifinal, but the 2022 event was only live for 5 hours on the sixth day of Playoffs.
Nevertheless, the 2023 event managed to outperform the event from last year in Average Viewers as well, a figure that is more representative of viewership for broadcasts with differing Airtime. English viewership saw a steady increase in terms of Peak Viewers, but Portuguese saw a huge jump in viewership. Although Paper Rex vs Evil Geniuses was the most popular match of the day, don’t let this fool you: the match between Fnatic and LOUD was highly watched and actually garnered more average concurrent viewers than the PRX vs EG game.
Fnatic and LOUD drew in 974K Peak Viewers and garnered 3.1M hours of watch time, over 500K more than the PRX vs EG game. Already a sizeable increase compared to the best-performing match of Day 6 for 2022, viewership for the discipline was rising as a whole for this section of Playoffs. A welcome surprise for the esports discipline to be sure and a stark contrast to the Group Stage viewership for the event. As we reported earlier during the event, Day 1 of the Group Stage saw a 22% drop in Peak Viewers compared to 2022 and the Group Stage overall lost 24% of its watch time compared to 2022.
Japanese remained one of the most popular languages of the event but did see a drop in viewership. No Japanese team qualified for Playoffs in 2022 or 2023, so this could possibly be due to the time difference between Los Angeles and Japan. The 2022 Champions event was hosted in Istanbul, only 6 hours behind Tokyo time, but Los Angeles is a whopping 16 hours behind the land of the rising sun. Disappointingly for PRX, Indonesian viewership did increase comparing 2022 to 2023, but Indonesian-language broadcasts still fail to bring in much viewership in Valorant.
Popular Channels for Playoffs Day 6
Looking at the most popular channels for Day 6 of the Playoffs stage, tarik still reigns supreme with 932.2K hours of watch time collected. Tarik is one of the most popular community casters in Valorant as a whole, but his trip to Los Angeles to host his watch parties directly from the event stadium has given him a solid boost to viewership.
Behind Tarik, various official broadcasts for the event garnered good viewership. The official Valorant Twitch account brought in 634.5K hours of watch time, closely followed by the Engish YouTube Live stream and its Brazillian counterpart. English, Portuguese, and Japanese remain the most popular languages for Valorant esports, even when no Japanese team is competing.
The next top community caster was Spanish esports professional mixwell. Mixwell is an ex-professional Counter-Strike player who built up a reputation for himself within the competitive scene, but in 2020 he made the jump to professional Valorant and began streaming on Twitch around the same time. Earlier this month he reached 1M Followers on Twitch and he is quickly becoming one of the most well-known Spanish community casters with a professional background in esports.
The next two casters are Brazillian streamers, but coreano managed to garner more watch time than loud_coringa, who is one of the most famous Brazillian streamers on Twitch. Coreano is a Brazillian analyst and commentator for Valorant and in this circumstance his expertise in Valorant helped him to compete with a streamer much larger than him.
Finally, wtcN is an ex-professional League of Legends player turned content creator. He covered the Valorant Champions event on his Twitch channel, mainly focusing on supporting the Turkish teams and players at the event. His stream of the LOUD vs Fnatic game was by far his most-watched stream of late, as he watched Fnatic and the final Turkish player remaining in the event get eliminated by the Brazillians.
Final two matches of VCT 2023
With Day 6 of the Playoffs behind us, all that is left for the VCT 2023 season are the Lower Bracket Final and Grand Final matches. Paper Rex is already confirmed to play in the Grand Final, and tonight Evil Geniuses will face off against LOUD to battle for the final spot in the Grand Finals.
We previously analysed the viewership of the Group Stage of the Valorant Champions 2023 event and made predictions on the viewership certain teams would bring to the Grand Final match. LOUD is the final remaining “Good Scenario” finalist in the event, meaning they would likely bring the most viewership to the final match. Evil Geniuses and Paper Rex are both what we named “Average Scenario” finalists, meaning if the Grand Final is between these two teams we predicted a maximum of 1.3M peak concurrent viewers.
The Valorant Champions 2023 event already surprised us by breaking the 1M Peak Viewers barrier on Day 6 of the Playoffs, and perhaps it might surprise again with the viewership it receives in the final two matches of the event. Keep up to date with the tournament page and watch out for an article analysing the viewership of Grand Finals after the event.
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