NA LCS Viewership did not Decline — Comparing Bo3 to Bo1
Doublelift’s video on “why NA LCS viewership is decaying” quickly triggered a storm of theories and speculations. A little bit of research shows that views for NA LCS are actually still increasing, compared to previous splits.
Maybe best of 3s are kind of boring? You really only want to see the best teams play. […] There’s no prize pool and there’s no frequent international tournaments — just one every six months. (Doublelift)
Sure, the amount of Redditors is declining and Overwatch ranked #1 in the Korean PC Bangs right after launch. But, none of these things have anything to do with LoL Esports’ viewership going downhill. Riot Games’ skyrocketing revenue was mentioned to contradict the theories, but let’s be honest, what does that have to do with the viewers LoL Esports attracts?
What does have something to do with it is the concurrent views on Twitch. Views seem lower than before and they probably are. Won’t get into this too much, since the number of viewers always drop in the middle of the split. People are getting tired of all the games, even more so — and probably faster — now that the format is Bo3. I expect the big numbers we’re all familiar with to be back again once playoffs start.
League of Legends is still consistently the most watched game on Twitch and still has millions of people logging in daily. Yes, eventually it will die, but not anytime soon.
Views-wise, there’s not a whole lot of growth, but there’s definitely some. The numbers of views didn’t increase linearly with the amount of games (+136%), but it did grow (+22%). The average view count per video went down from 62K views to 31K, simply because there’s a lot more games to watch.
Is it worth the amount of extra work that goes into planning, preparation, casting, broadcasting, analyzing etc? That’s something only specific people at Riot Games know — or most likely, are still trying to figure out.
Same goes for the total time spent watching. The amount of hours watched increased by almost 28%. The average watch time per video went from 17:52 minutes during the Spring Split to 18:41 minutes during Summer.
What can we get out of this? First off, I don’t think Riot Games is doing anything wrong. It looks like the viewership for each match up is decaying because the number of games increased by ~136%.
The view counts on YouTube look lower. The same goes for concurrent viewers count on Twitch. The thing is, viewers are actually watching more content. They became more picky, because they can. And, because watching all games isn’t an option for most of us, filthy casuals.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the LCS and the CS format undergo some changes before they start again in 2017.
Personally, I do think the format of LCS could use an update. What would you think of having fewer teams? Shorter splits? More international tournaments? Or maybe you agree with Reddit user Vurmalkin?
Honestly, I love it. I never watched all the games, I don’t do it in football or any other sport, why would I do it for LoL? But now I can watch my favorite teams for at least two games.
But Murrayz, why didn’t you use the statistics of the official channels?
I don’t have access to the analytics of those pages, which makes multiple aspects of the research more complicated. The amount of time necessary to gather and analyze 168 (50 Spring, 118 Summer) videos manually is insane. Second, even if I’d manually gather all the statistics, the information wouldn’t be correct. Information available for everyone would include extra time for the 2016 Spring Split, starting January 14. Those videos have been up ever since, giving the Spring Split roughly 140 more days (~20 weeks) to receive views.
The viewers using Eventvods’ channel are used as a representative sample of the entire population of LoL Esports viewers, for the sake of this article. 45% Europe, 45% America and 10% Africa, Asia and Australia.
Eventvods is an esports on demand platform. Providing spoiler free environments on Reddit, covering League of Legends, CS:GO, DotA 2, Hearthstone and Overwatch. Website coming soon™.
This is the very first time I write an article myself. Mistakes, feedback and constructive criticism is more than welcome! Let me know in the comments below, on Reddit or on Twitter (@Murrayzz).
Thanks to Simon, Punistick and Dane for helping me out.
