2024 VCT EMEA, Pacific Kickoffs benefit from co-casting as viewership numbers improve

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The recent Valorant Champions Tour 2024 Kickoff events turned out to be pretty successful in regards to viewership, with these tweaked additions to the Valorant esports calendar emerging more popular than the corresponding regional international leagues held in 2023. While the Pacific event ended as the game's most popular event for the region ever, the Americas one became its most popular regional event of all time.

One major factor for these higher viewership numbers was the role played by community casting, which has been a massive reason the discipline has quickly become one of the must-see competitive segments globally post-pandemic. Riot Games' successful policy of letting content creators — be they prominent or less-heard of names — stream the live broadcasts of matches at the same time as its own channels has even led to these influencers registering higher audience figures than official handles.

When looking at the four Kickoff leagues, readers can see that community casting took up a massive 69.6% of the overall watch time. Thanks to the likes of Tarik, Squeezie, Kamet0, and Ibai, these Valorant competitions have been able to attract a lot more eyeballs than any international league held last year.

The Pacific competition had the most lopsided split, with streamers hoovering up more than 77% of the total Hours Watched share. This was in stark contrast to the VCT 2023: Pacific League, where community casters only took up 33.6% of the overall watch time for live broadcasts of the matches.

  Share of community casting in overall watch time across Valorant international leagues this year   

Some of its top channels by audience in Kickoff Pacific were im_mittiii, kato_junichi0817, hanjoudesu, and 발로란트 챔피언스 투어. The second name managed to outperform all other official channels but the main Twitch Valorant Japan one, showing how much community casting can be effective across regions.

Moreover, apart from the support that Japanese fans gave its sides, there was another crucial reason for this increase among content creators to cover this regional league. The entry of Yay — a fan favorite among North American followers of the game — and Jingggxd's regular coverage of the games ensured a much larger English-speaking crowd was drawn toward proceedings.

It was followed by the EMEA tournament, which saw its co-broadcasters claim a little over 70% of the overall watch time. This was a rise of over 16% from the 2023 competition, with the online presence of prominent co-streamers being a large reason for this improvement.

There will be no surprises to learn the top individual streamers from this region. While Ibai mostly covered the matches of his team, KOI, Karmine Corp's games were closely followed by co-owner Kamet0. Gentle Mates must also be mentioned, with its activities receiving coverage from co-owner Squeezie, who ended up as the most popular overall handle to cover this tournament.

  Most popular channels from the four VCT 2024 Kickoff events   

Readers must note that there are certain trends in both these regions that affect the viewership dynamics. While Japanese fans are integral to how well events in the Pacific region do, the European and Middle Eastern segment relies heavily on celebrity streamers who also own prominent esports organizations. The performances of these clubs dictate how many viewers watch a particular game, and if they reach the latter stages of any tournament, it usually means the figures will turn out to be solid.

The Americas’ international leagues, intriguingly, followed a similar pattern over the past two years, with the share of community casting almost remaining the same. This region, too, sees audience interest depend on the displays of teams like Sentinels and LOUD, who are the most followed among fans in both continents in the region.

It has to be noted that the 2024 competition was highly lucrative, as the Sentinel versus LOUD Grand Final was the ideal match for the organizers. It ended up attracting over 820K Peak Viewers, making it one of the most popular Valorant events ever and number one by the same metric when considering non-global competitions in the discipline's fledgling history.

Expectedly, Tarik was the most followed content creator co-casting this event pooling teams from North and South America into one battle for regional supremacy. The likes of Mixwell and Loud_coringa also attracted enough attention to help it create history.

China, meanwhile, is a new addition to this season's schedule, but it has made a sedate start so far. Of course, its strict streaming rules make it a little hard to get the most accurate viewership data, especially from vernacular streaming services. However, the figures it did hit on Western platforms like Twitch and YouTube pointed to better things to come.

Valorant's competitive scene has continued to rise on an almost monthly basis. After a highly successful 2023, the current season has gotten off to a good start, and with a modified roadmap that includes lots more events for fans to latch on to, readers could see more records broken along the way. What they can be sure of is that community casting will make its presence felt at any tournament that does notch large viewership figures.