Valorant Champions instantly beats peak viewership of VCT Stage 2 Masters in first match

Day one of Valorant Champions 2022 has just started, and the event has already surpassed the peak viewership of VCT Stage 2 Masters Copenhagen.

The international event kicked off in Istanbul with a mouth-watering all-Asian clash between Paper Rex, a regular at elite events, and EDward Gaming, the first-ever Chinese representative in international competitions.

The hype of the match delivered, and a horde of fans tuned in to savor the return of international Valorant. Halfway through the second map, over 786,000 viewers were watching the match — surpassing the peak viewership of VCT Stage 2 Masters Copenhagen.

The Danish event had the lowest viewership numbers in international Valorant history with a peak viewership of 783,985 people, prompting fears that the esport was losing some steam as it approached its third year of existence.

But the viewership numbers of Valorant Champions 2022 on day one already seem to suggest otherwise. Additionally, the viewership figure reported by Esports Charts does not include Chinese streaming platforms, so the exact number of fans watching the match could be much higher.

Riot Games announced earlier this week the full list of watch party streams for Valorant Champions, which help to boost the event’s viewership numbers. At the time of writing, Tarik ‘tarik’ Celik has almost 90,000 people tuned in to his stream, with the likes of Tyson ‘TenZ’ Ngo, Chikara ‘SHAKA’ Kawakami, and Oscar ‘mixwell’ Cañellas also bringing in tens of thousands of viewers.

If fans continue to tune in, the event could very well break all sorts of viewership records and dethrone last year’s Valorant Champions — which had a peak viewership of 1,089,068 people — as the most popular competition in the game’s history.