The League of Legends Worlds finals was as dramatic as it can get, with two Korean teams fighting to lift the most prestigious trophy in the competitive scene. In the end, the underdog team, DRX, emerged as champions after a 3:2 victory over T1, with a record-high peak of 5.1 million concurrent viewers watching the matches unfold.
Interestingly, this was the first Worlds finals where select community members were allowed to restream matches with their own commentary, which attracted more fans to the event than in previous years. According to ESCharts, the finals achieved a peak concurrent viewership of 5,147,699 viewers, setting a new record for the event. This figure doesn't include Chinese streaming service numbers due to their unreliability.
? @DRXGLOBAL ARE THE 2022 WORLD CHAMPIONS #WORLDS2022 ? pic.twitter.com/XM3GGyK8wJ
— LoL Esports (@lolesports) November 6, 2022
The opening ceremony alone, which included a live performance from Lil Nas X and a guest appearance from MrBeast, attracted over 3.2 million concurrent viewers. That was more than any other match of the event, except for the finals. Part of the reason behind the record number of viewers is probably related to the community casters chosen by Riot Games. The publisher chose Sykkuno and Ibai ibai Llanos, two well-known Twitch streamers in the LoL community.
It was during the second match that the 5.1 million concurrent viewers figure was achieved. That was 2.3x more than the second most popular game of the tournament, the semi-final between JD Gaming and T1. Ibai's stream alone was responsible for 481K concurrent viewers.
Despite the massive success of this year's Worlds championship tournament, the 2021 Free Fire World Series is still the tournament with the highest peak of concurrent viewers, with a mind-blowing 5.4 million.
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KitGuru says: Did you tune into LoL Worlds this year?