https://escharts.com/news/worlds-2022-record-lol-esports
November 5 marked the end League of Legends World Championship that took place in San Francisco. Two Korean teams met in the decisive game, and DRX turned out to be stronger than T1 in a dramatic series that ended with a score of 3:2. Community casting appeared at the finals of the tournament for the first time in the history of major international LoL events, which was one of the reasons why Worlds 2022 set a new absolute record of the discipline in terms of audience and showed one of the highest results in all esports.
Results don’t include the statistics of Chinese streaming services due to the unreliability of the data they provide.
Before the final match, Riot Games held a colorful opening ceremony, which featured several musicians, including hip-hop star Lil Nas X. In addition, the most popular YouTuber in the world, MrBeast, was a special guest of the event. The ceremony attracted 3.2 million concurrent viewers and turned out to be more popular than any match of the event, with the exception of the final.
Soon we will share more detailed statistics on the event. In the meantime, you can purchase a PRO subscription and get access to additional data on the peak performance of the championship by languages and platforms, as well as find out the five most popular teams of the tournament.
Days before the final game, Riot Games unexpectedly announced that the DRX vs. T1 will be covered by several casters from the community, including Sykkuno and one of the main stars of Twitch, Ibai ibai Llanos. With their help, Worlds 2022 showed record statistics in the discipline and one of the highest results in the history of esports.
At its peak, the grand final attracted over 5.1 million concurrent viewers (during the 2nd map), which is 2.3 times more than the second most popular game of the tournament, semifinal between T1 and JD Gaming. Interestingly, the previous record was broken already during the 2nd map of the final match as it peaked at over 4.19 million PV.
Ibai made a significant contribution to the final statistics: his channel became the fifth most popular in the tournament with a peak audience of 481K concurrent viewers (this is more than the channels CBLOL, LVPes, LLA and otplol_ attracted).
In addition to the discipline record, Worlds 2022 also helped update the League of Legends category record on Twitch for peak audience. This year, the event gathered 100K more concurrent viewers on the platform than in 2021. In addition, Riot Games main channel (990K Peak Viewers) and LCK_Korea (692K Peak Viewers) updated their personal record by concurrent viewership.
The final day alone collected 24.4 million Hours Watched, bringing the final result of the event to 141.9 million Hours Watched. The average audience of the competition was 987.4K spectators.
Worlds 2022 also set several language records. In particular, the highest rates among all disciplines were set for:
English (1.6 million Peak Viewers),
Korean (1.2 million Peak Viewers),
Vietnamese (683K Peak Viewers).
In addition, a new League of Legends record was set on Spanish-language broadcasts: 855K Peak Viewers.
In terms of peak viewership, Worlds 2022 outperformed the previous League of Legends record holder (last year’s World Championship) by 1.1 million concurrent viewers. At the same time, the event took only second place by Hours Watched, losing Worlds 2021 by 19%: and this despite the fact that the current Worlds was 9 hours longer on air.
Among tournaments across all disciplines, Worlds 2022 ranked second in terms of concurrent audience. Free Fire World Series event, held in 2021 in Singapore, continues to hold the leadership: it peaked at 5.4 million concurrent viewers, which is 5% more than the result of the 2022 World Championship.