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This season’s League of Legends World Championship reeled in an impressive number of viewers on day one of the event.
According to reports, the tournament’s first day had a peak viewership of 1.12 million. The figure, while astounding, did not surpass the viewership count recorded for the first day of the Play-Ins. The Worlds 2021 also notably had a total of 1.3 million views on the first day of the event.
This year’s viewership count is still quite impressive and shows that the most significant event in League of Legends, the World Championship, is close to achieving the kind of viewership figures reeled in by its similarly popular counterparts in different esports like the Valorant Champions 2022.
The Valorant Champions Tour 2022 came to a close earlier this month in Istanbul, Turkey, and according to reports, the final match broke the record of Valorant’s most viewed tournament ever. The grand final between OpTic Gaming and LOUD recorded 1.5 million peak viewers as well as more than 520,000 average viewers.
The World Championship 2022 has also notably garnered a total of 9 million hours watched since kicking off. The competition’s viewership count was recorded without the Chinese viewership figures. The country quite possibly has League of Legends’ most prominent fan base, but it was not an easy task to obtain accurate data on the area.
The first day of the Play-Ins featured a match between European team Fnatic and North America’s Evil Geniuses. The face-off saw Fnatic emerge victorious and brought in the largest viewers of the day.
Fnatic went on to play against and defeat Japan’s DetonatioN FocusMe on the next day of the tournament. DFM came into the tournament as the resident champions of the LJL Summer Split this year.
The previous iteration of the World Championship came to a close in November 2021 and had just past 4 million peak viewers. Most of the views were reeled in during the event’s Grand Finals, where EDward Gaming emerged as the winner and took home the $489,500 (£442,000) prize money.
According to Riot Games, the Play-Ins of the World Championship will come to a close on October 4th, while the rest of the event will carry on till November 5th.
The event will be split up into five phases, each of which will be held in a number of separate locations in both North America and Mexico. This is the first time the League of Legends Worlds will be held in North America since 2016.
The Play-In stage will kick off in Mexico City, while the Hulu Theater in New York will host the groups and quarterfinals of the event. The semifinals will be held in the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, and the tournament finals will take place in San Francisco, at the Chase Center.
The winners of this year’s World Championship will not only go home with the impressive cash prize, but they will also be awarded a new, enriched version of the Summoner’s Cup.
Riot Games and famous jewelry brand Tiffany & Co. previously signed a multi-year deal, part of which enlisted the company as the designers of the trophy. The new Summoner’s Cup is said to be 27 inches long and weigh approximately 44 pounds. With the input of both organizations, it took around four months to put the pieces of the sterling silver trophy together.
Tiffany & Co. was also the brains behind the Silver Dragon Cup’s design last year. The jeweler added some new ideas to the LPL trophy to commemorate the tenth anniversary of League of Legends in China. Other commercial partners for the Worlds 2022 include the well-known food delivery company, Just Eat.
