Are Fans Watching More League of Legends?

Before the start of the Spring Split for the North American League of Legends Championship Series, Riot Games announced that they would be changing the format, moving back to individual games, rather than the best-of-3 series. One of the concerns raised at this time by Riot was that people were watching the broadcasts less and less. After some number crunching, it seems that Riot may have been on to something.

The NA LCS, by the numbers

With data taken from Esports Charts, who collect viewing numbers across a wide variety of eSports, we can look at the NA LCS, and see if the viewing numbers are similar to last year’s figures. The 2017 Spring Split of the NA LCS was an exciting time to be a fan, with teams such as Immortals, TSM, and Cloud9 running riot over the competition, while lower placed teams such as Phoenix1 and Dignitas still giving a challenge. The overall peak viewership figure for this split was 641 098, with an average viewer number of 168 325. The difference in peak and average can easily be explained by the fact that these figures include the various playoff games that took place towards the end of the split.

Moving forward to the Summer Split, we can see that the highest peak of viewers took place on the Finals series between TSM and Immortals, with the number reaching 455 141, while the average viewer number sitting at 142 966. Both the highest peak viewers and the average viewers took a dip between splits, by a significant figure it would seem.

Moving forward again to the current NA LCS Spring Split, and while it would be premature to give firm numbers without going through the playoffs and finals series just yet, we can see that so far, the highest peak took place on the first game of the season, between TSM and Team Liquid, a match that drew the attention of 401 560 viewers. While this is lower than previous highs, it’s likely that the playoffs and finals will boost this number significantly. The average viewer number, however, is sitting at around 191 211, which is quite a bit higher than previous splits average. This number can also be expected to rise, as the playoffs numbers boost the average.

Are people watching more?

What we have seen just from the numbers alone, is that more people are, on average, watching the NA LCS. With less games to watch, fans are seemingly drawn to view the games they can see, rather than just tuning in for specific matches once or twice a week. With more viewers comes more advertising revenue, as Riot gears up to make the NA LCS something that people will want to watch in its entirety, rather than just catching highlights when it’s all over.

For more information on when you can tune into the NA LCS and catch the games, check out the Official Schedule page, here.