Valorant Champions 2023 reaches another peak viewership milestone

As Valorant Champions 2023 enters its final stages, the tournament keeps delivering major viewership milestones.

Thursday’s upper bracket final between Paper Rex and Evil Geniuses, a nail-biter that went the full distance and was decided in overtime on Pearl, had an impressive peak viewership of 1,006,693 viewers, according to data firm Esports Charts.

This makes it the fifth Valorant Champions match to crack 1 million concurrent viewers. And, for the first time in the event’s history, this milestone was not reached during the last two days of the tournament.

Valorant Champions 2021, which featured a single-elimination bracket, saw over 1 million viewers tune in to the semi-final between Gambit Esports and KRÜ Esports and to the ensuing day’s grand final, pitting Gambit against Acend. Last year, both the lower bracket final (OpTic Gaming vs DRX) and the grand final (LOUD vs OpTic) drew over a million viewers.

The lower bracket semi-final, between LOUD and Fnatic, fell short of the million-viewer mark, hitting a peak of 974,779 concurrent viewers.

Thursday’s viewership milestone comes just a day after Leo Faria, Riot Games’ Global Head of Valorant Esports, said that viewership from Chinese platforms — which is not accounted for by Esports Charts — had already made Valorant Champions 2023 the most-watched in the event’s history.

According to Faria, one million Chinese viewers watched an EDG group stage match, despite the time-zone difference between the United States and China.

Valorant Champions 2023 will continue on Friday with the lower bracket match between LOUD and Evil Geniuses. The winner will go on to face Paper Rex in Saturday’s title decider.

Valorant Champions’ most-watched matches:

• OpTic vs LOUD (Valorant Champions 2022) – 1,505,804
• Gambit vs Acend (Valorant Champions 2021) – 1,089,068
• Gambit vs KRÜ (Valorant Champions 2021) – 1,060,257
• Paper Rex vs EG (Valorant Champions 2023) – 1,006,693
• OpTic vs DRX (Valorant Champions 2022) – 1,001,726