Worlds 2023 began Playoffs with one of the lowest peak viewerships of the event so far

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The Worlds 2023 Knockout Stage has officially kicked off with the Quarterfinals match between NRG eSports and Weibo Gaming. Weibo Gaming came out victorious with a convincing 3:0 win against the North American roster, but viewership for the only Playoffs game of the day was surprisingly low.

Despite November 2 hosting the first official match of the Knockout Stage, only 1.2M Peak Viewers was recorded for the match of the day. Usually, we expect viewership to rise for the playoff stage of any esports tournament, but today’s numbers were lower than the majority of the Group Stage at Worlds 2023. What happened to cause such weak viewership for the world’s biggest esports event of the year?

  Viewership statistics for the first day of Playoffs at Worlds 2023 

Excluding Day 6 of the Swiss Stage, the first day of Playoffs received the lowest viewership of the main event. The Quarterfinals match between NRG and Weibo received lower viewership than 82% of all Group Stage matches.

NRG and Weibo Gaming have played each other once already at Worlds 2023, on the first day of the Group Stage. NRG and Weibo’s match on Day 1 of the Swiss Stage received over 70K more Peak Viewers than today’s game. The low viewership for Day 1 of the Knockout Stage is an oddity resulting from a combination of factors.

Firstly, as we looked at in our recent article on team popularity for our PRO subscribers, North American teams have received some of the lowest viewership at Worlds 2023. North American viewership is likely also affected by the event being held in Korea. The Quarterfinals match began at 1am Pacific Standard Time, hardly an optimal time for fans from this region to support their local team.

Secondly, it seems that Chinese fans of League of Legends preferred to watch this game on Chinese live-streaming platforms. The Chinese Peak Viewers figure for this match was lower than matches held during the Play-In, but the Chinese-language streams on Twitch and YouTube are mostly watched by Chinese-speaking viewers outside of mainland China. The majority of support for these Chinese teams comes from fans in the mainland, who watch matches on their own Chinese live-streaming platforms.

Using the channel data of DoHuya, we can confirm that the most popular channel of the last 7 days for the popular platform Huya was 虎牙英雄联盟赛事. The channel covered the Quarterfinals match at Worlds 2023, and it achieved a Peak Heat Index of 58.6M, making the channel 198% more popular than the next-most popular channel of the week on Huya. 

Interestingly, although viewership for the day was low, YouTube generated a much larger proportion of the overall PV than normal and was almost more popular than Twitch. Highlighting the lack of support from Western fans, Twitch recorded its lowest Peak Viewers of any day from the Worlds 2023 main event. 

In summary, the match-up of NRG and Weibo Gaming may have been a worst-case scenario for the first day of Playoffs at Worlds 2023. North American teams have been statistically the weakest for viewership at Worlds so far this year, and the Chinese roster drew many fans to Chinese live-streaming platforms, instead of Twitch or YouTube.

However, tomorrow Worlds 2023 continues its Knockout Stage with Gen.G against Bilibili Gaming. Korean viewership was low today, but it surely will not be tomorrow. The viewership for Worlds will likely completely turn around tomorrow, and we will be able to assess the true potential of the Playoffs stage. Use our schedule page for Worlds 2023 to see when the action kicks off tomorrow, and track the viewership data of the event with our statistics page.