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The 2022 Valorant Champions grand finals broke the peak viewership record of previous Valorant esports events. The series between LOUD and OpTic Gaming peaked at over 1.4 million live viewers across official broadcasts and co-streams on the first two maps.
The number is impressively higher than the previous record in the grand finals of the Valorant Championships 2021 and the two Master Reykjavik tournaments, with at least 300,000 views. Each of the events moved past a million views, but peaked at just below 1.1 million. The 2022 Valorant Champions grand finals viewership record marks the sixth time a Valorant series has gone past a million views, which includes the grand finals for the past two seasons.
The event as a whole has excelled in terms of viewership since the first match. The first game broke the VCT Stage 2 Masters peak viewership record.
As such, it is no surprise that the all-time record was surpassed. The lower bracket finals, which saw OpTic Gaming and DRX face-off, also surpassed a million views. The series was the fifth Valorant match to do so.
For the 2022 Champions grand final, Riot Games flew in some of the biggest co-streamers to Istanbul. The main English Twitch broadcast supplied more than a quarter of a million views for the event. Other stream contributors in viewership include the official Twitch and YouTube Portuguese broadcasts, Tarik “tarik” Celik’s co-stream, the English YouTube stream, as well as the official Japanese broadcast, and fps_shaka’s co-stream.
Tarik’s co-stream hit more than 130k views and had several guest streamers take over while the event progressed. The streamer also made some cameo appearances on Valorant’s official Twitch stream as the event progressed. Another famous face who joined the official stream was Michael “shroud” Grzesiek.
The Valorant Champions has been branded the most watched VCT and Valorant event ever due to the concurrent viewer count. The tournament also notably broke other viewership records, such as the total number of hours watched. As at the second map of the grand finals, the tournament had garnered over 59 million hours watched which is 15 million more than the 2021 Valorant Champions.
The event also had more than 500,000 average viewers, 20,000 more than any previous Valorant event. While this is a monumental feat, it is also tied to the length of the entire tournament.
The 2022 Valorant Champions is notably the longest event in Valorant history, with 112 total hours of airtime, which is around 20 hours higher than other events. In comparison, Stage 2 Masters, which took place this year, was approximately 10 hours shorter than the Champions tournament of last year.
The 2022 Valorant Champions record is also a significant achievement for OpTic Gaming and their players, being the only team in Valorant history to reach a million concurrent viewers in three different matches. The first was the Champions 2022 lower final against DRX, then the Reykjavík 2022 final against LOUD, and the most recent Champions grand final against LOUD.
The new record shows how far Valorant has grown since the Valorant Masters Copenhagen, which was their lowest point in terms of viewership. The esports title’s ability to reel in such a large in-person and online turnout certainly bodes well for its future in the gaming industry.
