MSI 2022 breaks viewership record in T1 vs RNG final

The grand final of MSI 2022 has broken previous MSI viewership records, with the five-game series versus T1 and RNG peaking at almost 2.2 million concurrent viewers.

MSI 2022 culminated in a nail-biting five-game series between RNG and T1, with the LPL giants running out 3-2 winners. The grand final peaked at almost 2.2 million concurrent viewers, according to statistics website Esports Charts, a 19 percent increase from the previous year’s MSI final, between DAMWON KIA and RNG.

This means that MSI 2022 became the most-watched tournament in the event’s history and one of the most-watched in this esport.

The most popular language broadcast for the final was Korean (excluding stats from Chinese streaming sites) and T1 were the most-watched team of the tournament, racking up an impressive 20.9 million total hours watched.

Where does MSI 2022 stand in all-time records?

Although this was the most-watched MSI event ever, it still did not manage to break into the top-three events in League of Legends. It lags behind the 2019, 2020, and 2021 World Championships, which peaked at 3.8, 3.9, and 4 million peak viewers respectively.

It’s impressive that MSI 2022 managed to pull in such high viewership numbers – the tournament was plagued by technical issues from the outset, as eventual tournament winners RNG were unable to participate on LAN due to travel restrictions that forbade the team from leaving Shanghai.

Their remote attendance forced Riot to create an artificially inflated ping environment for the teams competing in Busan.

An error in the technology used to create that ping environment meant that teams were initially playing on much higher ping than intended. RNG’s first three games of the group stage had to be replayed to maintain competitive integrity.

• Read more: MSI 2022 should have ended on a high, but RNG’s virtual victory feels shallow

Despite facing multiple hurdles throughout the tournament, RNG prevailed in their final, taking down hometown favorites T1 in a five-game series. RNG’s run makes them the first organization in League history to win three MSI titles (2018, 2021 and 2022), with Shi ‘Ming’ Sen-ming and Li ‘Xiaohu’ Yuan-hao the only players who were part of all those title-winning campaigns.