The 2023 League of Legends World Championship has become the most-viewed esports event ever, according to esports data platform Esports Charts.
The event, held in South Korea, garnered a peak concurrent viewership figure of 6.4m and an average viewership of nearly 1.3m across its 116-hour air time — not including Chinese viewership.
Notably, the League of Legends season-ending spectacle beat the previous recorded holder, Free Fire World Series 2021 Singapore, by nearly 1m peak viewers.
The tournament’s most popular match-up was the World Finals between Chinese esports organisation Weibo Gaming and South Korean powerhouse T1. Ultimately it was the latter that won the event, claiming its fourth world title.
According to Esports Charts, T1 was the most popular esports organisation throughout the event, recording the most hours watched (45.5m) and average viewers (3m).
It’s worth noting that Esports Charts does not include Chinese viewership statistics on its platform due to the difficulty of measuring this data.
However, League of Legends is an incredibly popular game in China, with the country having its own franchised league alongside Korea, EMEA, North America, Brazil and Japan. A Chinese team in the Grand Finals will also likely have boosted viewership.
League of Legends esports’ official Chinese Huya channel recorded a peak ‘Heat’ index of 144.2m in the last seven days. Since other factors alongside viewership influence Heat, this does not directly reflect true viewership numbers in the country.
Alongside securing the peak viewership record, the 2023 League of Legends World Championship broke various language broadcast records per Esports Charts. The event became the most viewed esports tournament for Korean-language (2m), English-language (1.7m) and Vietnamese-language broadcasts (805,000). Moreover, the event also recorded a significantly higher average viewership than last year’s World Championship, garnering nearly 1.3m compared to 2022’s 987,000.
Riot Games recently announced that the Finals of next year’s World Championship will take place in London, England at the O2 Arena. Next year, Counter-Strike’s BLAST Premier Spring Final 2024 will also be held in the country’s capital.
