League of Legends has broken its previous record for concurrent viewers during the 2022 World Championship finals. The match between the South Korean region's second and fourth seeds, T1 and DRX, ended up going to a fifth and match-deciding round. Needless to say, it was a very exciting conclusion to World 2022. League of Legends fans rewarded the competition by watching the event at a level it's never managed before.
There's a long history to competitive League of Legends that can be both detrimental to its growth and one of its most significant boons. Part of that is the continued dominance of League of Legends esports by teams from South Korea. In turn, since they're so frequently featured in international competition, League of Legends fans are well familiar with several key players. Faker, perhaps League of Legends' biggest star, and Deft, who has always struggled in international competition, met in this year's championship and created one of the year's biggest storylines.
As reported by Esports Charts, the result was at least 5.1 million concurrent viewers watching the League of Legends 2022 World Championship across streaming platforms. The peak occurred during the second of five matches between T1 and DRX. Viewers were spread across a number of channels, including co-streamer Ibai who pulled in 481,000 viewers alone. Riot's own Twitch channel peaked at 990,000, and the South Korean esports channel for League of Legends hit 692,000.
While the 5.1 million viewers worldwide set League of Legends' 2022 World Championship apart from almost all other esports events, it's still not the most-viewed event of all time. The 2021 Free Fire World Series peaked at 5.4 million concurrent viewers. Still, after Dota 2's The International 2022 viewership declined by a million peak viewers to just 1.75 million in 2022, Riot and League of Legends fans will be happy to see excitement continues to grow for the MOBA.
As noted, there were some excellent storylines associated with the Worlds finals that likely contributed to viewership. But with the second game of five being peak viewership, it makes sense that the storylines were less of a focus than fans were just excited to watch. Viewership likely only dipped due to timezone difference, as the finals were held in San Francisco and ran quite late.
League of Legends remains one of the most popular video games in the world with tens of millions of active players still playing the game. A major factor in its continued success is steady viewership on streaming platforms like Twitch. The record-breaking performance of its World Championship shows just how successful League of Legends remains.
League of Legends is available now on PC.