LPL Spring 2023 recap — Lesser streaming options affect viewership

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The LPL Spring 2023, the top-tier regional League of Legends event in China, ended on April 15, with JD Gaming beating Bilibili Gaming 3-1 to emerge as champions. The event was quite successful, entering the all-time top ten for League of Legends Pro League events in terms of the number of watch hours.

JD Gaming defended its LPL Summer 2022 crown to take home ¥2M and quality for the Mid-Season Invitational 2023. Bilibili Gaming also booked its place in this coveted tournament and pocketed ¥1M as prize money.

  Basic stats and peak matches from the LPL Spring 2023   

The LPL Spring 2023 notched 200K Peak Viewers, earned from the Grand Final showdown between JD Gaming and Bilibili Gaming. All the top five matches at this event came from its Playoffs stage, with the finalists doing a one-two as their meeting in the Upper Bracket Semifinals was the second-most popular game.

The tournament also recorded 11.1M Hours Watched and 29K Average Viewers over an Airtime of 376h 45m. Speaking of the latter metric, competition winner JD Gaming was the most popular side in terms of average concurrent viewership.

To add to the popularity of the finalists, Bilibili Gaming ended up in four of the five most-watched matches. JD Gaming, EDward Gaming, and Oh My God were featured in two such matches each, although the last name could not make the list of most popular sides by ACC.

English was the most watched language with a massive 86.8% of the overall viewership pie. Compared to the Group Stage, this was a drop of almost 9%, with Vietnamese and Korean standing as the biggest gainers.

This time, there were very few streams on AfreecaTV, apart from the event not being shown on Nimo TV and the lack of streams on the official LPL Vietnam YouTube channel, both very popular options till last year. Thus, the viewership stats of local languages like Vietnamese and Korean fell. At the LPL Summer 2022, the previous split, they registered 19.4% and 11.61% of the total watch hours, respectively, meaning the lack of support from the usual broadcasts hit them in 2023.

  Language and platform dynamics from the competition   

The LPL Spring 2023 also saw Twitch dominate the platform battle, notching 70.1% of the total watch hours. This was a fall of 6.2% from the Group Stage, with YouTube and AfreecaTV adding to their shares during the Playoffs.

Compared to the previous split, Twitch saw a big rise of almost 15.5% in the viewership chart, while both YouTube and AfreecaTV lost out on their shares. Despite having negligible contributions, FB did see a tiny increase in its share, although it was the purple platform that was the big victor from the absence of Nimo TV and other channels broadcasting the League of Legends event.

The official LPL English Twitch and YouTube channels were the most watched and popular, respectively, hitting 52K PV/5.2M HW and 38K PV/2.1M HW, respectively. Caedrel, the LoL esports player and analyst for Riot Games, came in third on both metrics, hitting 28K PV and 1.5M HW. Interestingly, his stats improved compared to the LPL Summer 2022, considering even the official English channel for the tournament saw a slight decline.

LPL events ratings by Peak Viewers & Hours Watched

This event was the sixth-best all-time in HW numbers among LPL tournaments, behind the various splits from the past three years. The number one competition on this list remains the LPL Summer 2022, which did an incredible 17.9M HW, while it is fifth in terms of all-time concurrent viewership stats with 281K PV.

As already mentioned, the previous split had lots more channels broadcasting the event live, so its higher placing on this list is merited. Also, the LPL Spring 2023 just made the top ten in terms of most popular LPL competitions, coming in at the ninth position. Overall, this tournament did quite well despite the lesser number of channels.

Chinese League of Legends fans will be looking forward to the MSI 2023, where sides from the country have been highly successful, winning four of the seven editions so far, including Royal Never Give Up winning three of the last four iterations.