VALORANT Champions 2023, the game’s season-ending international event, garnered 1.29m peak viewers, a slight drop compared to its 2022 edition.
VALORANT Champions 2023 also recorded around 491,000 average viewers with six hours less air time than last year, according to esports viewership data platform Esports Charts.
It becomes the third-most watched VALORANT tournament ever by peak viewers, behind only last year’s Championship and VCT 2023: LOCK//IN São Paulo. VALORANT Champions 2022, the most watched VALORANT esports event, saw 1.5m peak viewers and around 525,000 average viewers with 115 hours of air time.
The most-watched match at this year’s VALORANT Champions was the grand final between Paper Rex and Evil Geniuses, which saw the North American esports organisation walk out victorious. The upper bracket final between the same teams placed second in terms of peak viewership. Fan favourites LOUD and Fnatic finished third and fourth respectively at the event.
The absence of Brazilian esports organisation LOUD in the final, a team known for its large fan base, could have affected viewership. According to Esports Charts, LOUD was the most-watched team during the tournament (18.7m hours watched).
Moreover, LOUD was a couple of thousand viewers short of being the second most-watched team in terms of average viewers (650,000), with Paper Rex (707,300) and Evil Geniuses (657,000) finishing first and second respectively.
VALORANT Champions is the culminating event in the VALORANT competitive season, serving as the game’s world championship and attracting the best teams from across the game’s global competitive ecosystem.
The VALORANT teams will now undergo a break before entering the off-season, which will see dozens of tournaments held by third-party organisers take place throughout the world before the new season starts in January 2024.
Riot Games also announced a set of changes for 2024, including a completely new region, China, getting its own franchised league.
