LCL Summer 2020: A new record for the CIS tournament

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League of Legends esports life in CIS is continuing to gain more and more traction. In the summer of 2020 Continental League has reached new peaks and set some new records.

2020 was a pleasant surprise For the League of Legends CIS fans and viewers. After a year, Continental League has terminated their exclusive broadcast rights with Yandex.Efir and finally returned on Twitch and YouTube. Needless to say, it made a lot of CIS fans very happy.

Around 115,000 viewers were watching the finals between Gambit and Unicorns Of Love at its peak, and 46,000 were watching the tournament on average. It is the best result for the league to date. Show-match between popular streamers and players became the second most popular match of the tournament.Almost all viewers were watching the tournament on Twitch.tv, 96% of total views to be exact. The rest 4% were watching the games on YouTube (3%) and VK (less than 1%).

Game developers were attracting the viewers with the usual methods. Every viewer who had watched the matches through the special page would get ingame prizes such as chests. Just in case if you are not that familiar with the game, these chests allow you to unlock new content in the game. Unfortunately, western viewers were not as lucky in this department, even though they had a similar concept on some of their tournaments, the amount of prizes were considerably lower in comparison with the CIS.

It's worth noting that the broadcast of the tournament finals turned out to be extremely unconventional... to say the least. Commentators and analysts went straight to the Bilgewater - a pirate port of Runeterra. Analysts were dressed as "sea conquerors", and everyone who had seen the short animated film “Double-Double Cross" surely recognized their surroundings.

This LCL Summer Finals 2020 ended in the same way as the last two years. In an intense battle, Unicorns Of Love have managed to defeat the legends of the league - Gambit, thus earning their spot at the World Championship. Despite the promising start, "Red Star" was not able to resist the sheer pressure of their opponent. As we've mentioned before, it's their second consecutive loss in the finals.

Unfortunately for Gambit, they've lost to the "Unicorns" not only in the finals, but also in the popularity "contest". Around 45,000 average viewers were watching the matches of Unicorns Of Love, and Gambit fell short in just 1,000 viewers. One Breath Gaming, league newcomers, became the 3rd most popular team of the tournament with 41,000 average viewers.

As we can notice, LCL is steadily gaining more viewers, which makes us believe in a very bright future of the discipline on the local market. If the tendency of the Continental League continues, we might witness some new records in the 2021 season.