LCS Summer Split 2023 viewership numbers are disappointing

Riot has regularly expressed concern for League of Legends in North America, but with viewership at an all-time low, fans are left to wonder what the league’s future holds.

The 2023 LCS Summer Split, which began on June 14 featuring ten of the top League of Legends teams in North America, has announced the viewership data for the first week. The opening game, a rematch between Cloud9 and Golden Guardians, the two finalists of the Spring Split, had an astonishingly low peak viewership that was just under 83,000 viewers, even when the viewership of the co-streamers was taken into consideration.

According to the esports viewership tracker, Esports Charts, it was the first time an LCS summer season opener failed to draw 100,000 concurrent views. Furthermore, the LCS has reached a six-figure viewership threshold only once in the opening week. According to Esports Charts, during Team Liquid’s win over 100 Thieves on June 15, the stream attracted 106 thousand people over 32 minutes.

2023 LCS Summer Split’s disappointing viewership numbers

Although the LCS had previously reached a peak of 178 thousand viewers in its opening weekend last season, and a few matches had at least six-figure viewership on the first day alone, the first week of the current season only had an average viewership of 64,707. The LCS Spring Split in 2023 saw a peak viewership of 271 376 and average viewership of 109 759, which represents a sharp decline from the peak and average viewership of 387, 072, and 123, 411, respectively, in 2022.

Surprisingly, high-profile matches with teams like NRG Esports and 100 Thieves don’t reach six figures despite having well-known players like CoreJJ, Doublelift, Ssumday, and Summit in them. This is very upsetting, especially considering the recent Delta Fox vs. Disguised show match’s impressive audience figures. When statistics from Tyler1 and other co-streams are taken into account, the match’s peak audience exceeded 100,000.

Some fans have claimed on social media that they had no idea the LCS Summer split had begun. First off, the league’s players decided to strike because the game developers changed its tier-two system, which resulted in the LCS Summer Split being delayed. Matches were only going to be played on Thursdays and Fridays, excluding the two Super Weeks, before Riot Games decided to add a third game day for the Summer split owing to the two-week delay. It is unclear if the scheduling of the games during the week or unawareness of the LCS is to blame for the viewership decline, but the low number dictates that LCS has several issues to address.

Header: Riot Games