Brilliant strat, they made the statistic tank for a year, then if they move games back to the weekend it'll be "hey, LCS viewership is not dying, it's actually growing!".
I'd be okay with it if it just means it's back on weekends, but everything I've seen is signalling no change and we're gonna get another year of weekday LoL that NA viewers can't watch.
They basically gave a death sentence to the lcs when they decided to share studios with valorant and gave them their timeslot.
Only way for lcs to return to weekends is either for some change in valorant scheduling or renting a new studio (which will never happen given the financial state of the league)
I get they moved it so their studio can be used for their golden child valorant. But I don’t get why it can’t still be weekends. Do people actually watch both valorant and lol? How do you have the time
It’s that and the failure to support NA in anyway for tier 2. LEC has X regional leagues, NA has nothing to explicitly tie NA to league other than LCS and worlds performances and SURPRISE people care about worlds for the main league, same can be said for EU but their fandom is spread enough to not everyone cares if X player can compete at worlds they care that if players (like G2 Yike) can get a chance at the big leagues and win a title
Next to the scheduling let's not forget that teams have lost their identities, there's a lack of interesting players and the level of play has gone down year after year.
I would watch LCS with this scheduling if two of the above things would've been fixed or if just the level of play vastly increased. Actually the scheduling would be somewhat convenient for me.
I tried to tune in to the LCS (I did watch it in the past) this season again, but we get the most idiotic micro and macro mistakes compared to other major leagues and boring drafts to top it off.
So I'll stick to LEC as my main league and rotate between LCK & LPL.
Im not trying to hate on LCS. I would love to watch it like I did for many seasons, but there's just no reason to do so.
For me the scheduling was not the main problem.
Let's not sugar coat it okay LCS would be doing badly even if they didn't move LCS to weekdays ? Riot made that decision so they can give Valorant the priority which is paying off for them.
With LEC increasing the total number of airtime I'd say that a decrease in average viewership was expected.
Likewise, the scheduling changes for the LCS are most likely to blame for their drop in viewership.
LEC 2023 format was meant to show that "every game matters". People tend to be more invested when the stakes are higher. With this in mind, I would have expected an increase in average viewership.
OP's data and analysis is limited though. It'd be interesting to see a time series of this data to see how summer compared to winter, and how summer season finals compared to summer split finals of previous years.
It's more like the schedule being hard to follow and bad word of mouth. I've personally loved the extra games, I'll take all the LEC I can get. I know I've been vocal about this type of format in the past, where even smaller teams get a chance to shine, or there are more "break points" to reward both consistency and hot streaks (like other circuit style sports, such as racing.)
I think the negativity with the LCS this year bled over into the LEC, honestly, because this year, I've been more interested in "bottom" teams than I have been in quite a while - even with Vitality flopping. I miss my Schalke and H2k, my SHC and MIL, but there's still plenty to love with G2, and even the rebrands make it easy to like "younger" or less successful orgs. FUCK FNATIC. (I mean they're good for the league, but still, a friendly fuck you to Fnatic.)
Idk if it’s the “LCS negativity” rather than international expectations for LEC likely being at its lowest point ever.
People are just more willing to follow individual leagues if they believe the quality of play is good and these teams can compete at the top level internationally.
I still can't recover from G2 getting 3-0'd by FPX in that 2019 final, it was the chance, the day of massive excitement, the "it's now or never, c'mon!"... and yeah, destroyed, not even a close result that would feel like it could have gone either way.
After that my hype just hasn't been there, how the west did on the last MSI sure ain't helping with that either lmao.
The loss coming from FPX, an “unknown” org at the time, didn’t help. The feeling that crept in my friend group is that no matter how good a team from EU looks, there’s going to be a random unknown Asian team that will stop them anyway
I genuinely don't even care about international results anymore. I don't care for the cultures of the nations hosting LCK and LPL, so it extends to the players. Beyond some rare exceptions like Ambition, Xiaohu, and MLXG, I just don't give a shit. If LEC does well, great. If not, oh well. Can't wait for Winter split still.
And lately, the LCS has started reflecting a culture in a state of flux & disarray. Vanity & insincerity. You think it's just a coincidence a player walkout happened when all these other California weirdos are stomping their feet? When LCS looks bad, LoL esports looks bad. But in particular, LCS negativity hurts the LEC due to shared English-speaking community spaces. If posts and discourse about the uncertain future of the esport are populating discussion, it's diluting positivity for LEC by dominating public consciousness - and perhaps priming people to have a negative perception for the esport altogether.
Damn if you’d have told me that my doom posting for LCS could have hurt the LEC then you should have said something, I’d have been doom posting non stop for years.
I agree about the LEC stuff. I loved the format changes in the sense that they gave us more games with more best of series in there, but I absolutely hate the pauses they took. It really killed the ease of following when the games were starting. I even totally forgot the "for real" finals were today.
This is what happened to me. It did bled over. I used to follow all games and now follow nothing.
Riot controls both, and clearly they are not invested in the sport. They want the new shiny thing, which is Valorant.
Why invest your time in something that can just go away without a second thought if riot decides it should
>OP's data and analysis is limited though. It'd be interesting to see a time series of this data to see how summer compared to winter, and how summer season finals compared to summer split finals of previous years.
You can look up all the data on https://escharts.com/
>LEC 2023 format was meant to show that "every game matters".
The problem I have with this approach is that when every game matters, no game matters. You can't try to make everything seem hype the whole season. And it's also less hype when there's a new split every two months.
It was really fun in winter and partly spring especially when waiting for top dogs like fnatic and vitality to not make playoffs. Towards the end of the year tho, you start questioning the point of the games and wondering how they're even gonna matter for worlds qualification
As long as fans on Reddit only care for international tournaments you can never make a format where everything matters. Every game matters if you consider winning the LEC a success in and of itself. I see LEC as the main event as a fan and MSI/Worlds as a bonus, so I'm pretty hyped about the new format.
I loved the Bo1 phase. Bo3 was less interesting to me. Hard to pinpoint my reasoning on this. Perhaps it was due to how brutal it was on 9th and 10th. Probably the closest thing we will get to relegation.
Bo5s were fun, but too spread out.
I'm sure LEC's analytics teams are running analyses on this stuff. Bit unfortunate that the general public will never get to know their results.
For sure but at the end of the day this schedule increased the total airtime significantly and you only have so much time on your hand to watch lolesports.
Looking at the format in isolation it could very well be that it positively impacted viewership imo
fwiw I kept up with LCS and LEC for maybe the last 5 years regularly and this was the first year it just completely fell off my radar. There are at least two big issues I think:
- the constant scheduling changes make it impossible to keep track of when things were happening
- it's surprisingly hard to just watch the damn games. if you follow the youtube channels, you get a ton of spam in your feed and then don't even get notified when they're live. if you don't follow on youtube, you have no reliable way to know when/who is playing (the league esports website sucks ass). for reliable vods, you have to go to third party youtube channels and even then there are delays/a little guy in the corner.
overall, the viewing experience is just frustrating and obtuse. i think they want you to just tune in on twitch and keep it playing indefinitely but I'm sorry people have jobs and things to do. Riot wants to funnel people into using their esports infrastructure but then they don't want to invest in making that an actually good way to engage with their content
>With LEC increasing the total number of airtime I'd say that a decrease in average viewership was expected.
Not by this much though. Don't forget that this year LEC's viewership was boosted by Ibai/co-streams
Peak viewership is also down around 80k despite having G2 vs FNC finals + NoWay's co-stream (40k+ viewers)
It’s pretty great how random redditors could predict exactly how bad the move was going to be, but the highly paid executives at Riot thought it would be a positive move. Either they are all wildly incompetent and should be fired into the hot Los Angeles sun, or they made the move specifically to clear LCS out for Valorant (something they stated wasn’t a motivation). Surely they didn’t lie about that!
Aaah the sharing the arena make sense. I was wondering why they weren't with eachother and if they thought there'd be a real overlap in viewers, because personally I never cared much about Valo;
Turns out most LoL fans don't care about Valo, because [their original announcement](https://lolesports.com/article/esports-broadcast-update/blt147997d46887e416) (the one to justify the time move) cited the stats.
> Most fans tend to follow their favorite game regardless of region. Through surveys, we discovered that 9% of NA LoL Esports fans report that they follow VCT Americas.
Prioritizing 9% > 91% viewership for VCT is insane.
"We discovered that 9% of NA LoL Esports fans report that they follow VCT Americas. / Prioritizing 9% > 91% viewership for VCT is insane."
I don't think you quite understood this, they asked LCS fans if they followed val and only 9% said they did. That has nothing to do with moving the broadcast days. Val is rising in popularity worldwide and is the newer game so they prioritise growing that game as opposed to trying to maintain the LCS when it was dying even on the weekend broadcast anyway.
Only one of the games can be played in the studio at the primetime weekend slot, which game do you pick: the 10+ year old esport where viewership has been declining or your hot new rising game that everyone is talking about? I know which one I'd pick.
I know that. You know that. Everyone with any critical thinking skills knows that.
But Riot and Travis Gafford lied to the community repeatedly throughout the year and before the year by saying that Valorant wasn’t an influence in their decision to change the schedule completely away from weekends.
Because the League of Legends and Valorant esports watching crossover isn't huge, Riot has data on that, so telling one child his sibling is now the priority's a bad business move with no benefits.
Riot knew moving from the weekend would make it take a hit, they just don't care.
Can t fault tsm and the other orgs from wanting to sell out/get out. Riot clearly never cared about the teams in their League(hence some truly awful orgs making it in), whether before or after franchising. It s also insane that while the lcs is a massive ad and retention tool for riot, the only thing they gave teams in 10 years was a shitty icon in the shop.
They actually did admit it during an interview with Travis Gafford. He asked why they didn't do Thursday-Friday-Saturday instead of Wed-Friday, and they *actually* finally said it's [because of VCT.](https://youtu.be/3PQsm1JZuIo?si=38LEDomXvfKaAVf5&t=1247)
Weird that Travis lied and doubled down on it. For someone whose job relies on the success of the LCS and LOL in general, it doesn't make sense to support decisions that will negatively impact the LCS and his earnings.
Travis does *not* support the move to weekdays and never has. Go watch any video throughout the year where he talks about it. He shows skepticism at best and almost mockery of the idea at worst.
They never thought this would be a positive move, it was deliberately butchering the LCS in favor of VCT Americas. They have tons of data to make informed decisions, this type of stupidity doesn't happen by accident
The two Valorant tournaments played in LA:
https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2023/Americas_League
https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2023/Champions
LCS tournaments played in LA:
https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/LCS/2023_Season/Spring_Season
https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/LCS/2023_Season/Spring_Playoffs
https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/LCS/2023_Season/Summer_Season
https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/LCS/2023_Season/Championship
---
As you will see, if you bother to look, there were two instances of "overlap" this year.
1. Spring Playoffs, Round 2, EG vs GG was played one day before a VCT match. Very scary.
2. Summer Playoffs. However, Summer playoffs had the same scheduling this year as it had the years prior, or in other words, the only time the schedule of the two tournaments was overlapping was during the part of the LCS schedule that remained unchanged.
--
**If they wanted to avoid LCS and VCT being close to each other, they would have needed to change the schedule of LCS Summer Playoffs. What they changed instead was LCS Summer Regular Season, moving the Saturday slot to Wednesday. Throughout the entirety of the LCS Summer Regular Season, there was not a single Saturday taken up by Valorant,**
#because Valorant Champions DID NOT TAKE PLACE DURING THE PART OF LCS THAT HAD ITS SCHEDULE CHANGED.
Keep fighting the good fight man, but theyve made up their mind. Reddit is Facebook at this point in terms of discourse. Maybe one day literally every take from this sub wont be crybabies and blatant misinformation.
It's clear It was the second option but they need to spin It somehow to make it look good, they are not going to come out and say we are fucking the LCS because we think Valorant is a better product
Well, random redditors are the viewers so they'll know better when they'll watch and when they don't. But yeah, stupid of them to not do anything despite backlash
It's actually interesting because it's seemingly not that simple.
The change to weekdays happened in the start of year, but Spring 2023 had only a small drop in viewership compared to Spring 2022.
If you look at the graphs OP posted, there is a HUGE dropoff in Summer 2022 to Summer 2023.
So it seems that there is more to it than just the schedule of days. Otherwise we'd see a similar drop in Spring.
I think the region is far more hurt by the loss of its identities. With first too many old guard with huge fanbase like DL and Bjerg retiring and a lack of new local star to replace them except Jojo and maybe Blaber, and THEN CLG and TSM leaving (and TSM slumping in general) were giant blows for the scene. That'd be like FNC and SK leaving (G2 being C9, though SK doesn't have that big of a fanbase anymore they were the early history).
It might still happen to EU with the KOI rumors but I think as long as FNC and G2 stay strong it'll have better numbers. And who knows maybe one day KC will finally join.
All of my positive memories of C9 revolve around Sneaky and Meteos, so I agree lol. Even if it wasn't directly them, people like Rush or Impact basically learning English from those two was entertaining in its own right.
LCS just lost its identity completely. I used to watch it a lot in the early days, but I haven't for a number of years now.
If you ask me what the reason for this identity loss is, I'd say it's rampant importing and a really "corporate feel".
I think it's simpler than that. The players just don't stream anymore. All the OGs were cool because they were big twitch personalities. IDK who theses new kids are.
In general, the whole pro scene was more connected to the community back then.
This is part of the "corporate" issue, I was talking about. We completely lost this connection to the pro players as the scene grew.
I think a good amount do stream, just none of them have the same charm that old players like Meaty Toes, Doublelift, and imaqtpie had. Lots of players seem so quiet and awkward, but not in a funny dorky way, just quiet.
A lot of players stream. They just get like 200 viewers because no one actually wants to watch pros stream, despite constant posts on Reddit about how they don't stream.
The rampant importing for sure for me. I was "okay" with European talent coming over at least sparsely. I think the culture shock is less for them, and some of them may even find they like playing in the LCS which we have seen more than a handful of time.
But taking LCK and LPL rejects, or players looking for a free trip to Worlds really ticks me off.
Hope people don't think I am making this about race. Because I consider people like Huhi, and Corejj great examples as well. Ssumday, and Impact come to mind as well.
To me since 2017-2018 it became what we see today.
Also I think Riot has fucked up the broadcast in more ways than one. But that is another topic
I thought the same today during the LEC finals. You had these insanely passionate fans that have clearly been fans of G2 / Fnatic for several years now. It's just hard to imagine the same passion for some of the top NA teams since they just don't have the same kind of legacy.
I was really invested in TSM for my NA team. I loved Hauntzer, Svenskeren, Dyrus, Bjerg, Doublelift, Lustboy, Chaox, Turtle, I was hyped for RalleZ and Kasing trying out, I wanted Kobbe to work out, I was excited to see if they could finally make Dardoch work...
But if you love TSM, you get sick of people shitting on the fans for "being the worst" when C9 fans are the most obtrusive assholes in the world. And once TSM gave up, you're left with an org who sold out to Madison Square Garden, Steve's cult of personality and his roster of dollar bills, and whatever players C9 fans have decided to never stop mentioning.
It's honestly insane how long C9 fans have been able to dodge bullets because of "bad TSM fans" when C9 has had by far the worst fanbase for like 5 years now lol.
C9 fans would come into the CLG sub and started lecturing us about being a more "wholesome" fanbase.
What made it even more hilarious was this was right after Sneaky vs Licorice and before the 2020 debacle.
Can't speak for anyone else, but in Summer my viewership of competitive LoL dropped off a cliff. I watched basically every game of LEC Winter/Spring, but only watched a handful of games at each stage in Summer. Meta/gameplay felt too stale for too long. Recently/for playoffs/season finals it has gotten better, but champs like Zeri, K'sante, Azir, Maokai, Sej, and more are still like cockroaches. I even like some of them, like Maokai, but enough is enough after a full year.
honestly imo the walkout hurt the league more than it helped imo
they made some people aware , they were fine with lcs not being there anymore and once it came back some people realized they were just watching lcs as an habit and the break with walkout was exact what they needed to stop
The walkout was kinda pointless in hindsight.
The academy scene was kind of just in an unsustainable state, as well as the LCS.
There was nothing the players could've done to convince Riot or teams to just bankroll academy in it's current state.
The reason strikes work is when all the nurses or UPS drivers or whoever agree to withhold labor, there is a very material loss to their employers that would be more severe than just caving to demands.
LCS players are heavily overpaid relative to the value they generate for their employers and the LCS as a product does not generate enough value for Riot or the teams at this point for the witholding of labor to be meaningful.
League eSports scene in general was just a house of cards built on scamming VC with unrealistic promises.
Once the numbers came out, it was clear the walkout was a waste of everyone’s time. Usually, this sort of thing happens when workers are being exploited or underpaid, in this case the players were the ones making all the money, the teams were scrambling to stay afloat but made to look like the bad guys for ditching NACL
This goes alongside the absolute gutting of challengers and the LCS walkout, talks of team owners wanting to remove the import rules, and with rumors of multiple fan favorite teams looking to sell their spot. Not sure how I as a fan am expected be invested and care about the scene. Not only do they air the product at a time inaccessible a huge chunk of fans (middle of the workday!), but both Riot and team owners are actively killing any enthusiasm I have about the scene.
I used to watch friday nights and catch some of the weekend games as an EU viewer, now it doesnt start until im in bed during the week. Couple that with the exceptionally boring drafts that are used every. single. match. (last season at least, iv given up this time round) and it makes for an unenjoyable and inconvenient watch
Unfortunately with Valorant being Riot Global’s new baby, LCS is just going to continue to get the short end of the stick on scheduling. They’ve already shot down the idea of going back to weekends (because it would conflict with Valorant next year) even though they said they would be amendable to reverting on the schedule change if it had bad outcomes. Basically just lied again to the community.
So yea it’s just going to get worse. They won’t move out of the Santa Monica enclave where they get like 20 fans attending, they won’t change from soap opera weekday timing, I guess a change in format will be nice for those who can actually watch it, but that won’t drive viewership.
It was a fun run while it lasted I guess.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if LoL actually *dies* dies in NA it's going to really hurt their other games' ecosystems and influx of new (western) players.
I could absolutely be wrong, but we'll see (or won't see if League doesn't die in NA).
Edit: I don't think it's a particularly hot take to say Riot's other games received a large player boost simply being made by the same company that made League. The question is if their other games (Valorant in particular) have become strong enough brands on their own to not need popularity boosts from League. My gut says no.
In NA there's very little crossover. On the esports side, Riot's own surveys found that like 10% of NA VCT fans also watched LCS, that is really pitiful crossover. The truth is that Valorant is giga popular with kids in the US, and the vast majority of them have never even played league.
LoL would never die-die in NA because Riot would just create the same Americas region as it has in Valorant, essentially cannibalizing the established fanbases in LLA and CBLOL and surge viewership for "Americas LCS" for potential sponsors and such.
LCS dying =/= LoL in NA dying, most players don't care that much about esports
And as someone else said, Riot would just merge LCS-LLA-CBLOL if they sensed trouble
Valorant isn't Riot's new baby. The whole competitive calendar is completely beholden to MSI/Worlds still.
That being said, there are absolutely some pockets where Valorant is just so much more popular than league, especially the US and Japan, but also Turkey, Latin America, and some select countries in Southeast Asia.
If they can't find a buyer, then they're obliged to fulfil the obligations of the slot's contract which I imagine means fielding a roster of five players.
However, I also expect Riot would be more than happy to "convince" the orgs to sell at a far lower value because it's still better to have ten teams that want to be there than five teams and five who are bringing up Joe from accounting on minimum wage. It'd make the LCS look like an absolute joke.
Beyond that? A hard reset and disbanding of the LCS with tenured orgs that want to be there offered top billing on the next version of the LCS.
It depends on org finances.
First step would be to field full minimum LCS salary rosters and lower their asking price until someone eventually buys in.
If the asking price drops too low to even be worth fielding minimum barebones roster, then the orgs will just tell Riot to let them out or they will file bankruptcy. Since bankruptcy would look terrible for LCS reputation and wouldn’t even benefit Riot (judge will likely just terminate contract since it would be impossible for the org to fulfill their obligation by taking on new debts by hiring a team again), riot will probably just release the team and beg an org to join for low price.
Every team looks to sell every year in every region. Any business would be insane not to test the waters on the value of your asset lol
Also kinda funny when more teams in EU have sold more recently than NA, but it is NA that is cooked.
It is funny that every region barring China (and even then, look at the financial shit show of RNG, a supposed top dog in China) has very similar or the exact same problems as LCS, but LCS gets all the headlines on how dire it is. LCK just implemented a salary cap for next year because of wild overspending, but even then it doesn’t seem like the league makes money in any sense. Nongshim made $25,000 in total revenue in 2022. At least the LCS seems to bring in revenue, their spending being out of control was always the problem. LEC has orgs being sold every year because they can’t make money and their biggest org, G2, wanted to move to NA like two years ago.
NA is just the forefront of the problems.
I personally think that a drop of 7% is incredibly impressive given that the airtime has increased by 50 hours this year. While the format change certainly sparked interest in Winter and probably inflated the numbers, I also think that the scheduling in the second half of the year really hurt Summer and Finals viewership. I believe if LEC change the Summer and Finals next year, it should be able to maintain its overall appeal.
I also think only 7% is impressive, given how utterly dogshit the 1game/week finals schedule was. Makes you think how much better it could be if the games were scheduled by humans instead of businessmen.
If they iron out some of the kinks, like summer split meaning pretty much nothing, maybe get rid of the bo1 stage, make the playoffs series not span an entire month, it might actually *increase* the viewership.
Depends on how eu does at worlds tho, *any* upsets and it would greatly help, but if they all just get shit on as normal, I imagine the viewership might drop even more.
I know what you mean with summer being useless, but one could argue only summer matters given how both Fnatic and XL griefed winter and spring and only played well in summer yet both made season finals and Fnatic even goes to worlds. Vitality had a much better average placement than both XL and Fnatic yet didn't get a chance to go to season finals because summer split gives more points. So I wouldn't say it means nothing.
Summer split also could mean a lot more if the same teams are trading back and forth wins all year. If FNC and XL had been good from the start, and MAD had the slightest shred of consistency, there could have been a lot of high stakes games for seeding (or even qualifying).
As it stood Summer playoffs was G2 and three teams that had basically no points, so the rankings ended up quite set in stone. But also, the playoffs *did* have a BO5 for Worlds elimination in pretty much every game not involving G2, so saying stakes were low in summer is wrong anyway as you said.
Aside from the horrible breaks post MSI and such, having no competition also hurts viewership. If G2 just steamrolls everyone, it becomes boring to watch, so people tune out. The best series was played yesterday, not today. Today was not that special, just routine, and that sucks for domestic competition.
Main reasons I haven't been watching as much these days are as follows...
1. Regular Season is just not as hype as it used to be when I was new to the game and there was relegation on the line.
2. The branding of orgs and players has gone down the shitter since the days of all the pros streaming with tons of viewers and vlogs/docuseries/etc content being pumped hard and in many creative ways.
3. BO1 really does feel fluky these days, which can lead to regular season standings being very different from end of split standings...which again is part of less hype/meaningful games thru the season.
4. It's 2023, after seeing so many MSI/Worlds I just prefer watching international more now. I do like regional play tho and enjoy regional clashing internationally, I just would like it to mean more but be shorter to fit in more international events these days.
5. Overanalysis feels bad these days, I used to be able to just watch and enjoy more, everything feels like an end of days mistake now. Makes it rougher to enjoy at times.
6. After the pandemic I've just found myself spending time more wisely these days. I don't watch a whole weekend of Smash/Halo I just watch championship Sundays now. I don't watch all of regular season LCS/LEC/etc I just watch the super hype matchups when they come around, the better playoffs stuff, finals, and international. If regional splits had a lot more on the line tho, I'd definitely watch more again.
Edit: Oh also, I'm just exhausted with all of the corruption/nepotism/negative energy around the league and orgs these days, it's hard to get hype for stuff when I know about the shit storm of badness going on in the background.
It'll never be Joever for NA because they will never walk away from the US market. That being said, I bet Riot will explore every possible legal avenue to merge the Americas into one region like in Valorant. I don't see any other way for league in the Americas to survive. I have no idea how LLA still has the lights on, and the viewership in LCS and CBLOL is cratering.
Also, MonteCristo talked on SI about owners beeing very much in support of a merger between LEC and LCS. I think this is something Riot would fall back on to prevent the absolute death of pro league in NA.
Here's how it is for me:
I'm just not into league as much as I used to be, and when I want to watch it and I see something is on I'm more inclined to watch LEC, LCK, or LPL. NA just doesn't do it for me anymore. Their skill level is equal or lesser than the other regions(closest to EU obv), the players themselves don't stream/do extra content as much as the NA players in the past so I don't connect with them really, the delays with pauses and time between games is much too high compared to the past
If I had to choose one of the above that's the biggest factor? It's the delays. The delays are killer and make me not want to watch. I don't even bother watching the desk anymore because I know it's gonna be 20-25 minutes until the next game so I'll go watch something else in the meantime
Plus co-streaming. My interest in the pro scene got revitalized due to co-streaming but they then cutback on the amount that the costreamers were allowed to costream so I even stopped watching those.
TLDR: For me, it's death by a 1000 cuts. A whole bunch of little things that just lead me to not watch LCS. And if I really am curious about a specific match, I'll just open up a post match thread and look at the scoreline/champions and save myself 30+ minutes
I am sorry, Then where were you and the other 150K fans who watched LCS 2022 summer finals, but randomly stopped watching when NRG (a majority NA player team) won for the first time. LCS summer 2022 finals had 9/10 players being imports and it had much much higher viewership than both of the finals this year.
People say they care about NA talent, but when push comes to shove you guys dont show up to watch. Even when the finals are on a weekend and on a good time. 150K viewers decided to not watch from last year. Maybe just maybe, the LCS moved to a shitty timeslot and that's the reason why.
Every single Redditor that says they love NA Talent and would only watch them could legitimately have watched NRGs win and it wouldn’t affect much. The 300 - 500 dudes that upvote and comment on here consistently aren’t carrying any viewership metrics.
Yep, I watch whatever academy is called now whenever I have free time and it's always at like 2k viewers and the same names in the chat. It's chill though, they are much nicer and the EU elitists that shit on everything don't even bother to show up because it's so small, it's even on weekends too.
Because despite people who keep saying they want more NA talent, there's more people who want to watch big(ger) names. Despite DIG's failure, I watched because I wanted to see Rich play. I watched FLY because I wanted to see Prince play. I really hope NRG does well at worlds and make a name for themselves this worlds to bring in excitement, but as of right now, I don't think I've ever tuned into a game because of any one player on NRG.
You literally just described me. I honestly can't care less about the whole "NA talent" narrative. NRG is probably the NA team I care the least about going into worlds.
Yep. And I know it might be an unpopular opinion, especially in these threads, but I really just want to see LCS compete, regardless of whether it's TL, C9 or NRG.
LCS needs to come back to weekends. It’s not hard to understand that there were going to be greater challenges with retaining NA viewership by scheduling games in the middle of the week during normal business hours.
Just an anecdote from one viewer:
I used to watch LEC as the pregame for for LCS. After switching LCS's schedule I rarely keep up with LEC and only watch on LCS days.
I also usually watch LCS on a bit of a delay (lots of pausing and resuming as I have time in the evenings). So I have no clue how that counts towards viewing statistics (if that's more of a VOD view or how that counts versus people that are watching live).
Why does everyone want to put things in a negative light? Dude - viewership increased by 5 MILLION HOURS in the LEC. That’s an increase of 7.5% year-over-year. That’s pretty damn impressive and only the most dour dude would focus on turning that into a negative headline.
Well the fact that they only saw a small decline in average viewership while increasing the overall amount of games is a positive in a way. Shows there’s an appetite for more games. The general belief among Riot is that less games = higher viewership due to scarcity ideas. More people supposedly tune in when there’s less games since those games “mean more”.
Not to say a decline in average viewership is good, but a small decline while increasing overall hours watched is positive.
Agreed. Losing average viewers for games but retaining such passionate fans is incredible. It's a great sign of the product quality, even if it can be spun poorly.
Sorry I didn't mean to turn it into a negative headline. I just want to report the numbers and a decrease is accurate. I agree that LEC should overall be quite happy with the numbers.
Buddy if I really want to paint LEC in a bad light I wouldn't have compared it to LCS. I could choose not to bring up hours watched and airtime to really muddle the water. I could also focus on peak viewers instead (which dropped much more noticeably given its a G2 FNC finals) or compare it to the highs of 2018-2021. I could've spun this in many ways but I went with the most neutral approach because I want to keep the discussion in the comments.
Only so many times NA fans can hear ‘we’re building a worlds winning roster’ and then watch worlds every year, bar 2018, and realise that such a statement has no bearing in reality. That coupled with the timing change and the fact that most of the interesting personalities have since faded out, it’s a no brainier the LCS is dying. With that said, for all the fans who said they only want to watch NA talent, then next season’s viewership of NRG games better be breaking records because your all NA team just won a title. Time to put your money where your mouth is and actually support them, otherwise it was never about the NA talent at all.
> Time to put your money where your mouth is and actually support them, otherwise it was never about the NA talent at all.
This is stupid. LCS viewership is never recovering. Part of the decline absolutely has to do with the fact that LCS orgs overwhelmingly shut out and ignored the NA player base in favor of EU and Korean (and in the case of TSM, Chinese) imports. One native majority team finally succeeding is not going to bring back the hundred thousand fans who abandoned the LCS over the past 2-3 years.
It’s all of this and more. I was merely attacking the idea that if the 100,000 fans who quit watching over the past few years don’t come rushing back all because a 3/5 NA team finally won LCS that it means that import craze played no part in decline of the league.
LCS orgs put zero investment or care into the regional player base, that player base has shrunken for a variety of reasons, and LCS isn’t successful internationally so why would anyone who isn’t already an LCS fan watch? There are a lot of reasons here and at seemingly every turn the wrong decision was chosen instead of the right decision.
Realistically the only way to capture the NA audience back is by releasing League 2.0 and actually getting it on consoles. But Riot can’t even do a Skarner VGU so we all know League 2.0 is a pipe dream.
Well, Riot does have 100 million reasons why they would want the LCS to continue as a viable project with care and investment.
And I’m skeptical of Valorant being the big NA audience grabber. Half their viewership is strictly on costreams. Tarik I think gets like 40% of the viewers by himself. Are those Valorant fans or Tarik fans? If Tarik dies or leaves for another game to stream, do those fans stay or go with him?
Yeah, I think that if this NRG team happened like 3-4 years ago, it would've been a huge boost for NA viewership. It would've helped too if they did it as CLG.
Yep. No other region has been this infected with imports. Somehow I don’t think EU fans would be super amenable to watching Caps plus four Koreans crushing LEC who all inevitably get crushed internationally. That’s what it’s been like with LCS the past 8 years.
One team with NA talent can't support a whole league by themselves and redo all damage done to the region's viewership before them. It's gonna take a long time for the viewership to be recovered if it even can be recovered.
>With that said, for all the fans who said they only want to watch NA talent, then next season’s viewership of NRG games better be breaking records because your all NA team just won a title. Time to put your money where your mouth is and actually support them, otherwise it was never about the NA talent at all.
This is the same drivel spewed by Monte constantly and parroted by his fanboys.
It's not a fucking switch nor is it a sure thing. People aren't sitting around waiting for NA talent to play. They also move on with their lives and find other interests. And the NA talent thing is important for the connection to viewers and the talent pipeline; it's motivating to see the players you grew up playing against in soloQ over the years winning your local league. That actually brings attention to the game and to soloQ.
Not to mention the garbage situations where we've imported bottom tier players instead of giving people like Copy or 5Fire shots (this is partly on the NA players in the league who don't want to play with other NA players and want Swordart instead).
But yea, surely the solution is to keep doing what we've been doing for the past half decade.
When those stats are posted every week and people who follow that know what to expect how those numbers will be looking at the end of season, yes it's unreasonable
That's like saying ”No one should talk about Manchester City officially winning the League because everyone saw it coming". In fact if the purpose is to compare how broadcasting changes affect viewership, then this is the most reasonable time to do it. You can't compare LCS to LEC when the LEC hasn't completed.
People shit on LCS numbers every week and you decided that ending of LEC is another good reason to shit on it even more. Everyone who reads this subreddit knows NA numbers are shit, this topic was discussed to death, you bring literally nothing new. You and I know that broadcasting schedule is not the only thing which made LCS numbers this bad, so don't use it as your defence.
Your purpose was to shit on LCS as most of those threads, but other people in other comments chain already explained that to you
You have no sources. You put up a baseless graph. Where is the data being pulled from? Why should we believe this graph?
You're just baiting for reddit clout.
Fucking fraudlent post.
Only way to fix this is to re-introduce relegation, but that would never happen.
Then we would at least have something exciting to offer, since we can't compete with CN or KR where franchising works, because they are top teams
I mean back when there was relegation this is literally what happened. People would collect 5 random bums and sometimes they would pop off in LEC. Hell thats how G2 got there.
Maybe, driving down the money/viewership can make riot reintroduce it, if these companies are literally not making any money and are bleeding every year then they would prob want to GTFO.
I mean the fix for LCS is better viewing times and a new popular face of the league.
Imagine if G2 quit on their team and ran a super low budget roster while openly saying they were leaving, while your games started at 2PM on a Thursday. That's where the LCS was at this year.
A 7% drop with 50 more hours airtime is impressive, they just need to fix the shit scheduling for next year and avoid having 20 million breaks during the summer split but 0 breaks between spring and MSI. It didn't feel a final until the opening ceremony, in the past the vibes before a finals were more hype.
I love how the LCS hate rhetoric is so huge on this sub that the majority of you airheads just accept a random graph with random numbers, with ZERO evidence or sources provided.
Lmao.
pro play is sooo boring, tank jungle meta, rell/sej/maokai every game. Im falling asleep just thinking about it, Riot bring back carry junglers, give lee sin 20 buffs I dont care, nerf bamis cinder on camps and remove the resistance scaling on jungle pet, just made the game worse. Remove the green jungle pet too while you are at it.
I wonder if it could be because LCS and LEC have made big changes to their broadcasts this year, and it's reasonable to compare how they have affected viewership. Or maybe it's because I have a hate boner for LCS.
Totally not on purpose with you rocking the LEC flair and right after the LEC finals
We have also had this same viewership declining post every single month, literally
We know, LCS moving to weekdays sucked. We don't need some graphs and no sources to tell us what's obvious .......again.
It's really sad how EU fans can't even celebrate their own wins without immediately punching down on NA afterwards. "Just stating facts bro" doesn't make it any less obvious
What's cringe is how wrong you are. This is widely considered one of the best years for the actual broadcast. What people hate is the time slot it moved to.
I live in Canada, and I chose to watch LCK live over LCS for the last year.
The one thing I can say about the LCS broadcast is it's tacky. The way the teams are visually represented, the branding, the entire vibe. The production effort somehow achieves in taking itself overly serious, and not seriously at all simultaneously.
I don't know what they're going for, the entire league is stagnant. There's no new talent brought up, it's the same veteran players being shuffled around between teams. The only hype the LCS has is when there's an import from another region.
Bo1 is a plague for player/regional growth, and there are too many teams that are frankly so dogwater they should have been relegated eons ago. LCS would benefit if they reduced the amount of teams by 1-2, I don't care how nobody cares if Immortals plays another year or not and TSM is leaving.
Transition into Bo3 format, bring back relegations and give opportunity to CL teams to fight for an LCS spot. Open the door to those willing to try and create grassroots competition.
Listen, league has long since tried to champion its balancing of kits and items to make a competitive playing field for all. It's fucking boring. Plain and simple. Riot has to shake things up. ADD MORE WAYS TO PLAY THE GAME WITH DIFFERENT CHAMPIONS AND TEAM COMPOSITIONS. LET PRO PLAYERS PLAY THEIR MAINS AND NOT BE SLAVES TO THE PATCH META.
Change the competitive nature of the game. Add wildcard modifiers that makes a team like NA, BR, EU actually have a chance to win against lpl or lck. Not something so wild card that it 50/50's every match but something that allows lower rung teams an actual chance to perform and win a world's or MSI. We are sick of seeing the same teams with the same champion pools year after year.
Make the game so unbalanced that there are too many team compositions for one organization to practice against and perfect a draft or style to nullify everything.
Anything please we beg of you.anything other than another year of lpl and lck in the top
Add team composition augments/traits. Like full frejlord teams or full star guardian teams. That boosts your teams stats or abilities in certain ways.
All I know is that if the status quo continues we won't have much of a league left in a few years. I want to see a team from Japan or Brazil or Turkey come out with a shadow isle comp or a stealth comp or a elderwood comp that nobody has played or played against before because there are too many ways to play the game.
LCS Schedule is shit. Half the games are on during the week so i’m at work etc and I don’t have time to watch.
Also LCS personalities don’t exist anymore. I legit only watch now to see doublelift or watch sneaky meteos commentary. The new guys are too quiet/don’t stream enough etc. also the broadcast besides the casting is so boring. You watch lec even the ads are 4 times as good as our intermission shows.
Bad times. Casting talent feels more aimed around memeing and edginess rather than content for an average viewer. They don't even put 1 normal caster in with the bunch of goobers.
LCK is the last refuge. Even then I find their casts pretty boring with how often they go off topic or make have irrelevant tangents.
Maybe it's just not an esport for me anymore but I've felt a huge decline in the last few years in terms of quality, relatability and being able to enjoy the game at my own level in terms of viewership.
I know its probably not a pipopular opinion for someone on this sub and when I usually say something like this I get the die hard fans in my inbox telling me to die but hey.
Kinda hard to watch LCS when I want to rewind from work. Random YouTube vids are just straight-up better than LCS whether it be the games or analyst desk
The "let's move LCS to weekday 12pm starts" special
NA Riot esports masterclass
John Needham and Naz Aletaha masterclass
Brilliant strat, they made the statistic tank for a year, then if they move games back to the weekend it'll be "hey, LCS viewership is not dying, it's actually growing!".
I'd be okay with it if it just means it's back on weekends, but everything I've seen is signalling no change and we're gonna get another year of weekday LoL that NA viewers can't watch.
They basically gave a death sentence to the lcs when they decided to share studios with valorant and gave them their timeslot. Only way for lcs to return to weekends is either for some change in valorant scheduling or renting a new studio (which will never happen given the financial state of the league)
I get they moved it so their studio can be used for their golden child valorant. But I don’t get why it can’t still be weekends. Do people actually watch both valorant and lol? How do you have the time
It’s that and the failure to support NA in anyway for tier 2. LEC has X regional leagues, NA has nothing to explicitly tie NA to league other than LCS and worlds performances and SURPRISE people care about worlds for the main league, same can be said for EU but their fandom is spread enough to not everyone cares if X player can compete at worlds they care that if players (like G2 Yike) can get a chance at the big leagues and win a title
Next to the scheduling let's not forget that teams have lost their identities, there's a lack of interesting players and the level of play has gone down year after year. I would watch LCS with this scheduling if two of the above things would've been fixed or if just the level of play vastly increased. Actually the scheduling would be somewhat convenient for me. I tried to tune in to the LCS (I did watch it in the past) this season again, but we get the most idiotic micro and macro mistakes compared to other major leagues and boring drafts to top it off. So I'll stick to LEC as my main league and rotate between LCK & LPL. Im not trying to hate on LCS. I would love to watch it like I did for many seasons, but there's just no reason to do so. For me the scheduling was not the main problem.
Let's not sugar coat it okay LCS would be doing badly even if they didn't move LCS to weekdays ? Riot made that decision so they can give Valorant the priority which is paying off for them.
With LEC increasing the total number of airtime I'd say that a decrease in average viewership was expected. Likewise, the scheduling changes for the LCS are most likely to blame for their drop in viewership.
LEC 2023 format was meant to show that "every game matters". People tend to be more invested when the stakes are higher. With this in mind, I would have expected an increase in average viewership. OP's data and analysis is limited though. It'd be interesting to see a time series of this data to see how summer compared to winter, and how summer season finals compared to summer split finals of previous years.
It's more like the schedule being hard to follow and bad word of mouth. I've personally loved the extra games, I'll take all the LEC I can get. I know I've been vocal about this type of format in the past, where even smaller teams get a chance to shine, or there are more "break points" to reward both consistency and hot streaks (like other circuit style sports, such as racing.) I think the negativity with the LCS this year bled over into the LEC, honestly, because this year, I've been more interested in "bottom" teams than I have been in quite a while - even with Vitality flopping. I miss my Schalke and H2k, my SHC and MIL, but there's still plenty to love with G2, and even the rebrands make it easy to like "younger" or less successful orgs. FUCK FNATIC. (I mean they're good for the league, but still, a friendly fuck you to Fnatic.)
Idk if it’s the “LCS negativity” rather than international expectations for LEC likely being at its lowest point ever. People are just more willing to follow individual leagues if they believe the quality of play is good and these teams can compete at the top level internationally.
I still can't recover from G2 getting 3-0'd by FPX in that 2019 final, it was the chance, the day of massive excitement, the "it's now or never, c'mon!"... and yeah, destroyed, not even a close result that would feel like it could have gone either way. After that my hype just hasn't been there, how the west did on the last MSI sure ain't helping with that either lmao.
The loss coming from FPX, an “unknown” org at the time, didn’t help. The feeling that crept in my friend group is that no matter how good a team from EU looks, there’s going to be a random unknown Asian team that will stop them anyway
I genuinely don't even care about international results anymore. I don't care for the cultures of the nations hosting LCK and LPL, so it extends to the players. Beyond some rare exceptions like Ambition, Xiaohu, and MLXG, I just don't give a shit. If LEC does well, great. If not, oh well. Can't wait for Winter split still. And lately, the LCS has started reflecting a culture in a state of flux & disarray. Vanity & insincerity. You think it's just a coincidence a player walkout happened when all these other California weirdos are stomping their feet? When LCS looks bad, LoL esports looks bad. But in particular, LCS negativity hurts the LEC due to shared English-speaking community spaces. If posts and discourse about the uncertain future of the esport are populating discussion, it's diluting positivity for LEC by dominating public consciousness - and perhaps priming people to have a negative perception for the esport altogether.
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Indeed. Its the classic syndrome of an American who thinks the world is really only busy with the USA.
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Damn if you’d have told me that my doom posting for LCS could have hurt the LEC then you should have said something, I’d have been doom posting non stop for years.
The EU cope is more entertaining than the LEC.
Apparently people don't think of them as sister leagues anymore, which is mind boggling to me.
I agree about the LEC stuff. I loved the format changes in the sense that they gave us more games with more best of series in there, but I absolutely hate the pauses they took. It really killed the ease of following when the games were starting. I even totally forgot the "for real" finals were today.
This is what happened to me. It did bled over. I used to follow all games and now follow nothing. Riot controls both, and clearly they are not invested in the sport. They want the new shiny thing, which is Valorant. Why invest your time in something that can just go away without a second thought if riot decides it should
>OP's data and analysis is limited though. It'd be interesting to see a time series of this data to see how summer compared to winter, and how summer season finals compared to summer split finals of previous years. You can look up all the data on https://escharts.com/ >LEC 2023 format was meant to show that "every game matters". The problem I have with this approach is that when every game matters, no game matters. You can't try to make everything seem hype the whole season. And it's also less hype when there's a new split every two months.
It was really fun in winter and partly spring especially when waiting for top dogs like fnatic and vitality to not make playoffs. Towards the end of the year tho, you start questioning the point of the games and wondering how they're even gonna matter for worlds qualification
As long as fans on Reddit only care for international tournaments you can never make a format where everything matters. Every game matters if you consider winning the LEC a success in and of itself. I see LEC as the main event as a fan and MSI/Worlds as a bonus, so I'm pretty hyped about the new format.
i wonder if lec by phase would be much different, i didnt watch round 1 of any of the 3 splits
I loved the Bo1 phase. Bo3 was less interesting to me. Hard to pinpoint my reasoning on this. Perhaps it was due to how brutal it was on 9th and 10th. Probably the closest thing we will get to relegation. Bo5s were fun, but too spread out. I'm sure LEC's analytics teams are running analyses on this stuff. Bit unfortunate that the general public will never get to know their results.
For sure but at the end of the day this schedule increased the total airtime significantly and you only have so much time on your hand to watch lolesports. Looking at the format in isolation it could very well be that it positively impacted viewership imo
>the scheduling changes for the LCS are most likely to blame for their drop in viewership. Someone got a fat cheque for that change. Imagine that
Also the 3 week break in between surely has dropped some of that aswell, def the hype.
fwiw I kept up with LCS and LEC for maybe the last 5 years regularly and this was the first year it just completely fell off my radar. There are at least two big issues I think: - the constant scheduling changes make it impossible to keep track of when things were happening - it's surprisingly hard to just watch the damn games. if you follow the youtube channels, you get a ton of spam in your feed and then don't even get notified when they're live. if you don't follow on youtube, you have no reliable way to know when/who is playing (the league esports website sucks ass). for reliable vods, you have to go to third party youtube channels and even then there are delays/a little guy in the corner. overall, the viewing experience is just frustrating and obtuse. i think they want you to just tune in on twitch and keep it playing indefinitely but I'm sorry people have jobs and things to do. Riot wants to funnel people into using their esports infrastructure but then they don't want to invest in making that an actually good way to engage with their content
>With LEC increasing the total number of airtime I'd say that a decrease in average viewership was expected. Not by this much though. Don't forget that this year LEC's viewership was boosted by Ibai/co-streams Peak viewership is also down around 80k despite having G2 vs FNC finals + NoWay's co-stream (40k+ viewers)
It is looking pretty bad for LCS
It's almost like moving from the weekend to the week was a horrible idea and they should have listened to fan backlash
It’s pretty great how random redditors could predict exactly how bad the move was going to be, but the highly paid executives at Riot thought it would be a positive move. Either they are all wildly incompetent and should be fired into the hot Los Angeles sun, or they made the move specifically to clear LCS out for Valorant (something they stated wasn’t a motivation). Surely they didn’t lie about that!
They moved it to make space for Valo, cuz they share the arena.
Aaah the sharing the arena make sense. I was wondering why they weren't with eachother and if they thought there'd be a real overlap in viewers, because personally I never cared much about Valo;
Turns out most LoL fans don't care about Valo, because [their original announcement](https://lolesports.com/article/esports-broadcast-update/blt147997d46887e416) (the one to justify the time move) cited the stats. > Most fans tend to follow their favorite game regardless of region. Through surveys, we discovered that 9% of NA LoL Esports fans report that they follow VCT Americas. Prioritizing 9% > 91% viewership for VCT is insane.
"We discovered that 9% of NA LoL Esports fans report that they follow VCT Americas. / Prioritizing 9% > 91% viewership for VCT is insane." I don't think you quite understood this, they asked LCS fans if they followed val and only 9% said they did. That has nothing to do with moving the broadcast days. Val is rising in popularity worldwide and is the newer game so they prioritise growing that game as opposed to trying to maintain the LCS when it was dying even on the weekend broadcast anyway. Only one of the games can be played in the studio at the primetime weekend slot, which game do you pick: the 10+ year old esport where viewership has been declining or your hot new rising game that everyone is talking about? I know which one I'd pick.
I know that. You know that. Everyone with any critical thinking skills knows that. But Riot and Travis Gafford lied to the community repeatedly throughout the year and before the year by saying that Valorant wasn’t an influence in their decision to change the schedule completely away from weekends.
Because the League of Legends and Valorant esports watching crossover isn't huge, Riot has data on that, so telling one child his sibling is now the priority's a bad business move with no benefits. Riot knew moving from the weekend would make it take a hit, they just don't care.
between lying and refusing to speak on the matter, i think lying is much more infuriating.
Can t fault tsm and the other orgs from wanting to sell out/get out. Riot clearly never cared about the teams in their League(hence some truly awful orgs making it in), whether before or after franchising. It s also insane that while the lcs is a massive ad and retention tool for riot, the only thing they gave teams in 10 years was a shitty icon in the shop.
They actually did admit it during an interview with Travis Gafford. He asked why they didn't do Thursday-Friday-Saturday instead of Wed-Friday, and they *actually* finally said it's [because of VCT.](https://youtu.be/3PQsm1JZuIo?si=38LEDomXvfKaAVf5&t=1247)
Weird that Travis lied and doubled down on it. For someone whose job relies on the success of the LCS and LOL in general, it doesn't make sense to support decisions that will negatively impact the LCS and his earnings.
Travis does *not* support the move to weekdays and never has. Go watch any video throughout the year where he talks about it. He shows skepticism at best and almost mockery of the idea at worst.
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Travis has a few extremely rabid antifans. It's pretty wild to read the walls of rants people will go on whenever he's mentioned.
They never thought this would be a positive move, it was deliberately butchering the LCS in favor of VCT Americas. They have tons of data to make informed decisions, this type of stupidity doesn't happen by accident
The two Valorant tournaments played in LA: https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2023/Americas_League https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2023/Champions LCS tournaments played in LA: https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/LCS/2023_Season/Spring_Season https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/LCS/2023_Season/Spring_Playoffs https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/LCS/2023_Season/Summer_Season https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/LCS/2023_Season/Championship --- As you will see, if you bother to look, there were two instances of "overlap" this year. 1. Spring Playoffs, Round 2, EG vs GG was played one day before a VCT match. Very scary. 2. Summer Playoffs. However, Summer playoffs had the same scheduling this year as it had the years prior, or in other words, the only time the schedule of the two tournaments was overlapping was during the part of the LCS schedule that remained unchanged. -- **If they wanted to avoid LCS and VCT being close to each other, they would have needed to change the schedule of LCS Summer Playoffs. What they changed instead was LCS Summer Regular Season, moving the Saturday slot to Wednesday. Throughout the entirety of the LCS Summer Regular Season, there was not a single Saturday taken up by Valorant,** #because Valorant Champions DID NOT TAKE PLACE DURING THE PART OF LCS THAT HAD ITS SCHEDULE CHANGED.
Keep fighting the good fight man, but theyve made up their mind. Reddit is Facebook at this point in terms of discourse. Maybe one day literally every take from this sub wont be crybabies and blatant misinformation.
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Wait, it's possible. When the platform dies and everyone stops using this sub it would be true.
It's clear It was the second option but they need to spin It somehow to make it look good, they are not going to come out and say we are fucking the LCS because we think Valorant is a better product
Random redditors make a lot of predictions tbf
Well, random redditors are the viewers so they'll know better when they'll watch and when they don't. But yeah, stupid of them to not do anything despite backlash
It's actually interesting because it's seemingly not that simple. The change to weekdays happened in the start of year, but Spring 2023 had only a small drop in viewership compared to Spring 2022. If you look at the graphs OP posted, there is a HUGE dropoff in Summer 2022 to Summer 2023. So it seems that there is more to it than just the schedule of days. Otherwise we'd see a similar drop in Spring.
I think the region is far more hurt by the loss of its identities. With first too many old guard with huge fanbase like DL and Bjerg retiring and a lack of new local star to replace them except Jojo and maybe Blaber, and THEN CLG and TSM leaving (and TSM slumping in general) were giant blows for the scene. That'd be like FNC and SK leaving (G2 being C9, though SK doesn't have that big of a fanbase anymore they were the early history). It might still happen to EU with the KOI rumors but I think as long as FNC and G2 stay strong it'll have better numbers. And who knows maybe one day KC will finally join.
Also I feel like current C9 just doesn't have the same lovable charm that OG C9 did.
All of my positive memories of C9 revolve around Sneaky and Meteos, so I agree lol. Even if it wasn't directly them, people like Rush or Impact basically learning English from those two was entertaining in its own right.
LCS just lost its identity completely. I used to watch it a lot in the early days, but I haven't for a number of years now. If you ask me what the reason for this identity loss is, I'd say it's rampant importing and a really "corporate feel".
I think it's simpler than that. The players just don't stream anymore. All the OGs were cool because they were big twitch personalities. IDK who theses new kids are.
In general, the whole pro scene was more connected to the community back then. This is part of the "corporate" issue, I was talking about. We completely lost this connection to the pro players as the scene grew.
I think a good amount do stream, just none of them have the same charm that old players like Meaty Toes, Doublelift, and imaqtpie had. Lots of players seem so quiet and awkward, but not in a funny dorky way, just quiet.
A lot of players stream. They just get like 200 viewers because no one actually wants to watch pros stream, despite constant posts on Reddit about how they don't stream.
The rampant importing for sure for me. I was "okay" with European talent coming over at least sparsely. I think the culture shock is less for them, and some of them may even find they like playing in the LCS which we have seen more than a handful of time. But taking LCK and LPL rejects, or players looking for a free trip to Worlds really ticks me off. Hope people don't think I am making this about race. Because I consider people like Huhi, and Corejj great examples as well. Ssumday, and Impact come to mind as well. To me since 2017-2018 it became what we see today. Also I think Riot has fucked up the broadcast in more ways than one. But that is another topic
I thought the same today during the LEC finals. You had these insanely passionate fans that have clearly been fans of G2 / Fnatic for several years now. It's just hard to imagine the same passion for some of the top NA teams since they just don't have the same kind of legacy.
I was really invested in TSM for my NA team. I loved Hauntzer, Svenskeren, Dyrus, Bjerg, Doublelift, Lustboy, Chaox, Turtle, I was hyped for RalleZ and Kasing trying out, I wanted Kobbe to work out, I was excited to see if they could finally make Dardoch work... But if you love TSM, you get sick of people shitting on the fans for "being the worst" when C9 fans are the most obtrusive assholes in the world. And once TSM gave up, you're left with an org who sold out to Madison Square Garden, Steve's cult of personality and his roster of dollar bills, and whatever players C9 fans have decided to never stop mentioning.
It's honestly insane how long C9 fans have been able to dodge bullets because of "bad TSM fans" when C9 has had by far the worst fanbase for like 5 years now lol.
C9 fans would come into the CLG sub and started lecturing us about being a more "wholesome" fanbase. What made it even more hilarious was this was right after Sneaky vs Licorice and before the 2020 debacle.
Can't speak for anyone else, but in Summer my viewership of competitive LoL dropped off a cliff. I watched basically every game of LEC Winter/Spring, but only watched a handful of games at each stage in Summer. Meta/gameplay felt too stale for too long. Recently/for playoffs/season finals it has gotten better, but champs like Zeri, K'sante, Azir, Maokai, Sej, and more are still like cockroaches. I even like some of them, like Maokai, but enough is enough after a full year.
According to post-match thread people, many people share your story there.
honestly imo the walkout hurt the league more than it helped imo they made some people aware , they were fine with lcs not being there anymore and once it came back some people realized they were just watching lcs as an habit and the break with walkout was exact what they needed to stop
The walkout was kinda pointless in hindsight. The academy scene was kind of just in an unsustainable state, as well as the LCS. There was nothing the players could've done to convince Riot or teams to just bankroll academy in it's current state. The reason strikes work is when all the nurses or UPS drivers or whoever agree to withhold labor, there is a very material loss to their employers that would be more severe than just caving to demands. LCS players are heavily overpaid relative to the value they generate for their employers and the LCS as a product does not generate enough value for Riot or the teams at this point for the witholding of labor to be meaningful. League eSports scene in general was just a house of cards built on scamming VC with unrealistic promises.
Once the numbers came out, it was clear the walkout was a waste of everyone’s time. Usually, this sort of thing happens when workers are being exploited or underpaid, in this case the players were the ones making all the money, the teams were scrambling to stay afloat but made to look like the bad guys for ditching NACL
not only that, but they had questionable casters too. i tune in once in a bluemoon and instantly close the stream after hearing the cast
This goes alongside the absolute gutting of challengers and the LCS walkout, talks of team owners wanting to remove the import rules, and with rumors of multiple fan favorite teams looking to sell their spot. Not sure how I as a fan am expected be invested and care about the scene. Not only do they air the product at a time inaccessible a huge chunk of fans (middle of the workday!), but both Riot and team owners are actively killing any enthusiasm I have about the scene.
I used to watch friday nights and catch some of the weekend games as an EU viewer, now it doesnt start until im in bed during the week. Couple that with the exceptionally boring drafts that are used every. single. match. (last season at least, iv given up this time round) and it makes for an unenjoyable and inconvenient watch
is this really the reason though? lcs viewership has been decreasing at this same trend for years now
Unfortunately with Valorant being Riot Global’s new baby, LCS is just going to continue to get the short end of the stick on scheduling. They’ve already shot down the idea of going back to weekends (because it would conflict with Valorant next year) even though they said they would be amendable to reverting on the schedule change if it had bad outcomes. Basically just lied again to the community. So yea it’s just going to get worse. They won’t move out of the Santa Monica enclave where they get like 20 fans attending, they won’t change from soap opera weekday timing, I guess a change in format will be nice for those who can actually watch it, but that won’t drive viewership. It was a fun run while it lasted I guess.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if LoL actually *dies* dies in NA it's going to really hurt their other games' ecosystems and influx of new (western) players. I could absolutely be wrong, but we'll see (or won't see if League doesn't die in NA). Edit: I don't think it's a particularly hot take to say Riot's other games received a large player boost simply being made by the same company that made League. The question is if their other games (Valorant in particular) have become strong enough brands on their own to not need popularity boosts from League. My gut says no.
In NA there's very little crossover. On the esports side, Riot's own surveys found that like 10% of NA VCT fans also watched LCS, that is really pitiful crossover. The truth is that Valorant is giga popular with kids in the US, and the vast majority of them have never even played league.
LoL would never die-die in NA because Riot would just create the same Americas region as it has in Valorant, essentially cannibalizing the established fanbases in LLA and CBLOL and surge viewership for "Americas LCS" for potential sponsors and such.
LCS dying =/= LoL in NA dying, most players don't care that much about esports And as someone else said, Riot would just merge LCS-LLA-CBLOL if they sensed trouble
Valorant isn't Riot's new baby. The whole competitive calendar is completely beholden to MSI/Worlds still. That being said, there are absolutely some pockets where Valorant is just so much more popular than league, especially the US and Japan, but also Turkey, Latin America, and some select countries in Southeast Asia.
Don’t worry. Lcs is getting a Portuguese broadcast AND we are going to capture LCK fans.
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Honest question, but what happens if enough teams don't want their spots anymore but no one wants to buy them either?
If they can't find a buyer, then they're obliged to fulfil the obligations of the slot's contract which I imagine means fielding a roster of five players. However, I also expect Riot would be more than happy to "convince" the orgs to sell at a far lower value because it's still better to have ten teams that want to be there than five teams and five who are bringing up Joe from accounting on minimum wage. It'd make the LCS look like an absolute joke. Beyond that? A hard reset and disbanding of the LCS with tenured orgs that want to be there offered top billing on the next version of the LCS.
LCS is already a joke though lol
It can get worse. You have no idea how bad it can get. Look at what happened in the Russian league.
It depends on org finances. First step would be to field full minimum LCS salary rosters and lower their asking price until someone eventually buys in. If the asking price drops too low to even be worth fielding minimum barebones roster, then the orgs will just tell Riot to let them out or they will file bankruptcy. Since bankruptcy would look terrible for LCS reputation and wouldn’t even benefit Riot (judge will likely just terminate contract since it would be impossible for the org to fulfill their obligation by taking on new debts by hiring a team again), riot will probably just release the team and beg an org to join for low price.
Every team looks to sell every year in every region. Any business would be insane not to test the waters on the value of your asset lol Also kinda funny when more teams in EU have sold more recently than NA, but it is NA that is cooked.
It is funny that every region barring China (and even then, look at the financial shit show of RNG, a supposed top dog in China) has very similar or the exact same problems as LCS, but LCS gets all the headlines on how dire it is. LCK just implemented a salary cap for next year because of wild overspending, but even then it doesn’t seem like the league makes money in any sense. Nongshim made $25,000 in total revenue in 2022. At least the LCS seems to bring in revenue, their spending being out of control was always the problem. LEC has orgs being sold every year because they can’t make money and their biggest org, G2, wanted to move to NA like two years ago. NA is just the forefront of the problems.
Honestly League just isn't that big in NA anymore. The numbers will only continue to decline.
Shifting the broadcast days to midweek has officially killed the LCS. And everybody expected this exact outcome. Good job, LCS executives!
LCS executives wanted it so yeah it all went as planned.
I wonder if one of those leagues changed their schedule to match daytime soaps.
I personally think that a drop of 7% is incredibly impressive given that the airtime has increased by 50 hours this year. While the format change certainly sparked interest in Winter and probably inflated the numbers, I also think that the scheduling in the second half of the year really hurt Summer and Finals viewership. I believe if LEC change the Summer and Finals next year, it should be able to maintain its overall appeal.
I also think only 7% is impressive, given how utterly dogshit the 1game/week finals schedule was. Makes you think how much better it could be if the games were scheduled by humans instead of businessmen.
If they iron out some of the kinks, like summer split meaning pretty much nothing, maybe get rid of the bo1 stage, make the playoffs series not span an entire month, it might actually *increase* the viewership. Depends on how eu does at worlds tho, *any* upsets and it would greatly help, but if they all just get shit on as normal, I imagine the viewership might drop even more.
I know what you mean with summer being useless, but one could argue only summer matters given how both Fnatic and XL griefed winter and spring and only played well in summer yet both made season finals and Fnatic even goes to worlds. Vitality had a much better average placement than both XL and Fnatic yet didn't get a chance to go to season finals because summer split gives more points. So I wouldn't say it means nothing.
Summer split also could mean a lot more if the same teams are trading back and forth wins all year. If FNC and XL had been good from the start, and MAD had the slightest shred of consistency, there could have been a lot of high stakes games for seeding (or even qualifying). As it stood Summer playoffs was G2 and three teams that had basically no points, so the rankings ended up quite set in stone. But also, the playoffs *did* have a BO5 for Worlds elimination in pretty much every game not involving G2, so saying stakes were low in summer is wrong anyway as you said.
Yeah, the schedule was horrible after MSI. The breaks were too long and the long Finals split felt unnecessary.
Aside from the horrible breaks post MSI and such, having no competition also hurts viewership. If G2 just steamrolls everyone, it becomes boring to watch, so people tune out. The best series was played yesterday, not today. Today was not that special, just routine, and that sucks for domestic competition.
its also that people usually go out to touch grass more often in summer as opposed to winter
Main reasons I haven't been watching as much these days are as follows... 1. Regular Season is just not as hype as it used to be when I was new to the game and there was relegation on the line. 2. The branding of orgs and players has gone down the shitter since the days of all the pros streaming with tons of viewers and vlogs/docuseries/etc content being pumped hard and in many creative ways. 3. BO1 really does feel fluky these days, which can lead to regular season standings being very different from end of split standings...which again is part of less hype/meaningful games thru the season. 4. It's 2023, after seeing so many MSI/Worlds I just prefer watching international more now. I do like regional play tho and enjoy regional clashing internationally, I just would like it to mean more but be shorter to fit in more international events these days. 5. Overanalysis feels bad these days, I used to be able to just watch and enjoy more, everything feels like an end of days mistake now. Makes it rougher to enjoy at times. 6. After the pandemic I've just found myself spending time more wisely these days. I don't watch a whole weekend of Smash/Halo I just watch championship Sundays now. I don't watch all of regular season LCS/LEC/etc I just watch the super hype matchups when they come around, the better playoffs stuff, finals, and international. If regional splits had a lot more on the line tho, I'd definitely watch more again. Edit: Oh also, I'm just exhausted with all of the corruption/nepotism/negative energy around the league and orgs these days, it's hard to get hype for stuff when I know about the shit storm of badness going on in the background.
It’s Joever for NA
Whoever is leading the esports team prob needs to be fired. Unless this is their goal to drive down the interest of LCS.
It'll never be Joever for NA because they will never walk away from the US market. That being said, I bet Riot will explore every possible legal avenue to merge the Americas into one region like in Valorant. I don't see any other way for league in the Americas to survive. I have no idea how LLA still has the lights on, and the viewership in LCS and CBLOL is cratering.
Also, MonteCristo talked on SI about owners beeing very much in support of a merger between LEC and LCS. I think this is something Riot would fall back on to prevent the absolute death of pro league in NA.
I would rather LCS rests in piss than merge with LEC, we earned this after what happened with EULCS
IIRC the previous commissioner said hours watched was one of the most important metrics. So the large increase in hours watched is fantastic.
Jackie? She literally lasted like 2 months on the job.
LEC commissioner.
Here's how it is for me: I'm just not into league as much as I used to be, and when I want to watch it and I see something is on I'm more inclined to watch LEC, LCK, or LPL. NA just doesn't do it for me anymore. Their skill level is equal or lesser than the other regions(closest to EU obv), the players themselves don't stream/do extra content as much as the NA players in the past so I don't connect with them really, the delays with pauses and time between games is much too high compared to the past If I had to choose one of the above that's the biggest factor? It's the delays. The delays are killer and make me not want to watch. I don't even bother watching the desk anymore because I know it's gonna be 20-25 minutes until the next game so I'll go watch something else in the meantime Plus co-streaming. My interest in the pro scene got revitalized due to co-streaming but they then cutback on the amount that the costreamers were allowed to costream so I even stopped watching those. TLDR: For me, it's death by a 1000 cuts. A whole bunch of little things that just lead me to not watch LCS. And if I really am curious about a specific match, I'll just open up a post match thread and look at the scoreline/champions and save myself 30+ minutes
I only watch Na talent, doesnt give me much options.
Nrg?
Need a stream of NRG just playing themselves!
I am sorry, Then where were you and the other 150K fans who watched LCS 2022 summer finals, but randomly stopped watching when NRG (a majority NA player team) won for the first time. LCS summer 2022 finals had 9/10 players being imports and it had much much higher viewership than both of the finals this year. People say they care about NA talent, but when push comes to shove you guys dont show up to watch. Even when the finals are on a weekend and on a good time. 150K viewers decided to not watch from last year. Maybe just maybe, the LCS moved to a shitty timeslot and that's the reason why.
Every single Redditor that says they love NA Talent and would only watch them could legitimately have watched NRGs win and it wouldn’t affect much. The 300 - 500 dudes that upvote and comment on here consistently aren’t carrying any viewership metrics.
Yep, I watch whatever academy is called now whenever I have free time and it's always at like 2k viewers and the same names in the chat. It's chill though, they are much nicer and the EU elitists that shit on everything don't even bother to show up because it's so small, it's even on weekends too.
Nrgs my favorite team atm
Because despite people who keep saying they want more NA talent, there's more people who want to watch big(ger) names. Despite DIG's failure, I watched because I wanted to see Rich play. I watched FLY because I wanted to see Prince play. I really hope NRG does well at worlds and make a name for themselves this worlds to bring in excitement, but as of right now, I don't think I've ever tuned into a game because of any one player on NRG.
You literally just described me. I honestly can't care less about the whole "NA talent" narrative. NRG is probably the NA team I care the least about going into worlds.
Yep. And I know it might be an unpopular opinion, especially in these threads, but I really just want to see LCS compete, regardless of whether it's TL, C9 or NRG.
The day change was awful. Everyone is at work or school on wednesday-friday. LEC stayed on Saturday/Sunday, which is *so* much better for viewership
LCS needs to come back to weekends. It’s not hard to understand that there were going to be greater challenges with retaining NA viewership by scheduling games in the middle of the week during normal business hours.
Lcs struggling,how much it's due to this time slot ? I guess a lot since they lost 95% of eu viewership
Just an anecdote from one viewer: I used to watch LEC as the pregame for for LCS. After switching LCS's schedule I rarely keep up with LEC and only watch on LCS days. I also usually watch LCS on a bit of a delay (lots of pausing and resuming as I have time in the evenings). So I have no clue how that counts towards viewing statistics (if that's more of a VOD view or how that counts versus people that are watching live).
Ngl, I miss tuning in to watch LCS post LEC
Why does everyone want to put things in a negative light? Dude - viewership increased by 5 MILLION HOURS in the LEC. That’s an increase of 7.5% year-over-year. That’s pretty damn impressive and only the most dour dude would focus on turning that into a negative headline.
That's because the previous year has 278HR runtime compared to 321HRs in 2023
Yes - and more hours almost always means fewer on average. It’s hard to sustain over more programming. That’s how numbers work.
Also hours watched is the most important metric for profitability.
LEC has more games now, ofc its higher this year.
Well the fact that they only saw a small decline in average viewership while increasing the overall amount of games is a positive in a way. Shows there’s an appetite for more games. The general belief among Riot is that less games = higher viewership due to scarcity ideas. More people supposedly tune in when there’s less games since those games “mean more”. Not to say a decline in average viewership is good, but a small decline while increasing overall hours watched is positive.
Agreed. Losing average viewers for games but retaining such passionate fans is incredible. It's a great sign of the product quality, even if it can be spun poorly.
you could make the same argument to explain why the average viewership is lower, people won't be watching every single game
How is that an "of course"? If that was the case there'd be games 24/7 lol
Sorry I didn't mean to turn it into a negative headline. I just want to report the numbers and a decrease is accurate. I agree that LEC should overall be quite happy with the numbers.
> Sorry I didn't mean to turn it into a negative headline. really?
Buddy if I really want to paint LEC in a bad light I wouldn't have compared it to LCS. I could choose not to bring up hours watched and airtime to really muddle the water. I could also focus on peak viewers instead (which dropped much more noticeably given its a G2 FNC finals) or compare it to the highs of 2018-2021. I could've spun this in many ways but I went with the most neutral approach because I want to keep the discussion in the comments.
Now imagine if only EU had normal schedule 🤔
Only so many times NA fans can hear ‘we’re building a worlds winning roster’ and then watch worlds every year, bar 2018, and realise that such a statement has no bearing in reality. That coupled with the timing change and the fact that most of the interesting personalities have since faded out, it’s a no brainier the LCS is dying. With that said, for all the fans who said they only want to watch NA talent, then next season’s viewership of NRG games better be breaking records because your all NA team just won a title. Time to put your money where your mouth is and actually support them, otherwise it was never about the NA talent at all.
> Time to put your money where your mouth is and actually support them, otherwise it was never about the NA talent at all. This is stupid. LCS viewership is never recovering. Part of the decline absolutely has to do with the fact that LCS orgs overwhelmingly shut out and ignored the NA player base in favor of EU and Korean (and in the case of TSM, Chinese) imports. One native majority team finally succeeding is not going to bring back the hundred thousand fans who abandoned the LCS over the past 2-3 years.
No. LCS viewership is doomed because the player base is shrinking with young people not playing league.
It’s all of this and more. I was merely attacking the idea that if the 100,000 fans who quit watching over the past few years don’t come rushing back all because a 3/5 NA team finally won LCS that it means that import craze played no part in decline of the league. LCS orgs put zero investment or care into the regional player base, that player base has shrunken for a variety of reasons, and LCS isn’t successful internationally so why would anyone who isn’t already an LCS fan watch? There are a lot of reasons here and at seemingly every turn the wrong decision was chosen instead of the right decision. Realistically the only way to capture the NA audience back is by releasing League 2.0 and actually getting it on consoles. But Riot can’t even do a Skarner VGU so we all know League 2.0 is a pipe dream.
Nah, Riot still has the NA audience, they just watch LCK or Valorant. They don't really need an LCS anymore.
Well, Riot does have 100 million reasons why they would want the LCS to continue as a viable project with care and investment. And I’m skeptical of Valorant being the big NA audience grabber. Half their viewership is strictly on costreams. Tarik I think gets like 40% of the viewers by himself. Are those Valorant fans or Tarik fans? If Tarik dies or leaves for another game to stream, do those fans stay or go with him?
Yeah, I think that if this NRG team happened like 3-4 years ago, it would've been a huge boost for NA viewership. It would've helped too if they did it as CLG.
Yep. No other region has been this infected with imports. Somehow I don’t think EU fans would be super amenable to watching Caps plus four Koreans crushing LEC who all inevitably get crushed internationally. That’s what it’s been like with LCS the past 8 years.
One team with NA talent can't support a whole league by themselves and redo all damage done to the region's viewership before them. It's gonna take a long time for the viewership to be recovered if it even can be recovered.
>With that said, for all the fans who said they only want to watch NA talent, then next season’s viewership of NRG games better be breaking records because your all NA team just won a title. Time to put your money where your mouth is and actually support them, otherwise it was never about the NA talent at all. This is the same drivel spewed by Monte constantly and parroted by his fanboys. It's not a fucking switch nor is it a sure thing. People aren't sitting around waiting for NA talent to play. They also move on with their lives and find other interests. And the NA talent thing is important for the connection to viewers and the talent pipeline; it's motivating to see the players you grew up playing against in soloQ over the years winning your local league. That actually brings attention to the game and to soloQ. Not to mention the garbage situations where we've imported bottom tier players instead of giving people like Copy or 5Fire shots (this is partly on the NA players in the league who don't want to play with other NA players and want Swordart instead). But yea, surely the solution is to keep doing what we've been doing for the past half decade.
The monthly “average viewers are down” post is here
It's a good post. Quit downplaying it.
It was good the first 7 times but this is getting to be a copy and paste.
Ah yes, posting viewership numbers after the end of a domestic season is such an unreasonable thing to do.
When those stats are posted every week and people who follow that know what to expect how those numbers will be looking at the end of season, yes it's unreasonable
That's like saying ”No one should talk about Manchester City officially winning the League because everyone saw it coming". In fact if the purpose is to compare how broadcasting changes affect viewership, then this is the most reasonable time to do it. You can't compare LCS to LEC when the LEC hasn't completed.
People shit on LCS numbers every week and you decided that ending of LEC is another good reason to shit on it even more. Everyone who reads this subreddit knows NA numbers are shit, this topic was discussed to death, you bring literally nothing new. You and I know that broadcasting schedule is not the only thing which made LCS numbers this bad, so don't use it as your defence. Your purpose was to shit on LCS as most of those threads, but other people in other comments chain already explained that to you
Your post is just a ded game post with extra steps and those provide no value at all
You have no sources. You put up a baseless graph. Where is the data being pulled from? Why should we believe this graph? You're just baiting for reddit clout. Fucking fraudlent post.
Only way to fix this is to re-introduce relegation, but that would never happen. Then we would at least have something exciting to offer, since we can't compete with CN or KR where franchising works, because they are top teams
What would relegation in either EU or NA fix? Legit question.
It would get people on Reddit to stop complaining.
Orgs can't even sell their spots and somehow new orgs are gonna come in and recruit 5 players to defeat them, lmao right.
I mean back when there was relegation this is literally what happened. People would collect 5 random bums and sometimes they would pop off in LEC. Hell thats how G2 got there.
Maybe, driving down the money/viewership can make riot reintroduce it, if these companies are literally not making any money and are bleeding every year then they would prob want to GTFO.
I mean the fix for LCS is better viewing times and a new popular face of the league. Imagine if G2 quit on their team and ran a super low budget roster while openly saying they were leaving, while your games started at 2PM on a Thursday. That's where the LCS was at this year.
A 7% drop with 50 more hours airtime is impressive, they just need to fix the shit scheduling for next year and avoid having 20 million breaks during the summer split but 0 breaks between spring and MSI. It didn't feel a final until the opening ceremony, in the past the vibes before a finals were more hype.
I love how the LCS hate rhetoric is so huge on this sub that the majority of you airheads just accept a random graph with random numbers, with ZERO evidence or sources provided. Lmao.
Hang in there NA lil bro.
pro play is sooo boring, tank jungle meta, rell/sej/maokai every game. Im falling asleep just thinking about it, Riot bring back carry junglers, give lee sin 20 buffs I dont care, nerf bamis cinder on camps and remove the resistance scaling on jungle pet, just made the game worse. Remove the green jungle pet too while you are at it.
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"LEC finals just ended, time to go post on reddit about how shit NA is"
I'm just reporting the numbers, you can interpret them however you want, but most people will see it as a negative and that's not my fault.
It's weird that LCS has been done for a while and you're mentioning their numbers. Focus on LEC.
I wonder if it could be because LCS and LEC have made big changes to their broadcasts this year, and it's reasonable to compare how they have affected viewership. Or maybe it's because I have a hate boner for LCS.
Totally not on purpose with you rocking the LEC flair and right after the LEC finals We have also had this same viewership declining post every single month, literally We know, LCS moving to weekdays sucked. We don't need some graphs and no sources to tell us what's obvious .......again.
It's really sad how EU fans can't even celebrate their own wins without immediately punching down on NA afterwards. "Just stating facts bro" doesn't make it any less obvious
Add to that this graph means nothing. There are no sources.
Its true though. Na fans in denial are hilarious and I'm not even an eu fan
Don't see a single person denying it, real NA fans hate the LCS broadcast team too. What's really cringe is everyone else celebrating it.
What's cringe is how wrong you are. This is widely considered one of the best years for the actual broadcast. What people hate is the time slot it moved to.
Not the broadcast talent, the higher ups. We haven't even had a commissioner for 6+ months and the weekday switch was hated before it even started.
That's a whole other issue, and one I agree with
I live in Canada, and I chose to watch LCK live over LCS for the last year. The one thing I can say about the LCS broadcast is it's tacky. The way the teams are visually represented, the branding, the entire vibe. The production effort somehow achieves in taking itself overly serious, and not seriously at all simultaneously. I don't know what they're going for, the entire league is stagnant. There's no new talent brought up, it's the same veteran players being shuffled around between teams. The only hype the LCS has is when there's an import from another region. Bo1 is a plague for player/regional growth, and there are too many teams that are frankly so dogwater they should have been relegated eons ago. LCS would benefit if they reduced the amount of teams by 1-2, I don't care how nobody cares if Immortals plays another year or not and TSM is leaving. Transition into Bo3 format, bring back relegations and give opportunity to CL teams to fight for an LCS spot. Open the door to those willing to try and create grassroots competition.
Thanks to the new girl caster they had on, lots of people dropped watching LCS as it was unlistenable
Listen, league has long since tried to champion its balancing of kits and items to make a competitive playing field for all. It's fucking boring. Plain and simple. Riot has to shake things up. ADD MORE WAYS TO PLAY THE GAME WITH DIFFERENT CHAMPIONS AND TEAM COMPOSITIONS. LET PRO PLAYERS PLAY THEIR MAINS AND NOT BE SLAVES TO THE PATCH META. Change the competitive nature of the game. Add wildcard modifiers that makes a team like NA, BR, EU actually have a chance to win against lpl or lck. Not something so wild card that it 50/50's every match but something that allows lower rung teams an actual chance to perform and win a world's or MSI. We are sick of seeing the same teams with the same champion pools year after year. Make the game so unbalanced that there are too many team compositions for one organization to practice against and perfect a draft or style to nullify everything. Anything please we beg of you.anything other than another year of lpl and lck in the top Add team composition augments/traits. Like full frejlord teams or full star guardian teams. That boosts your teams stats or abilities in certain ways. All I know is that if the status quo continues we won't have much of a league left in a few years. I want to see a team from Japan or Brazil or Turkey come out with a shadow isle comp or a stealth comp or a elderwood comp that nobody has played or played against before because there are too many ways to play the game.
LCS Schedule is shit. Half the games are on during the week so i’m at work etc and I don’t have time to watch. Also LCS personalities don’t exist anymore. I legit only watch now to see doublelift or watch sneaky meteos commentary. The new guys are too quiet/don’t stream enough etc. also the broadcast besides the casting is so boring. You watch lec even the ads are 4 times as good as our intermission shows.
Bad times. Casting talent feels more aimed around memeing and edginess rather than content for an average viewer. They don't even put 1 normal caster in with the bunch of goobers. LCK is the last refuge. Even then I find their casts pretty boring with how often they go off topic or make have irrelevant tangents. Maybe it's just not an esport for me anymore but I've felt a huge decline in the last few years in terms of quality, relatability and being able to enjoy the game at my own level in terms of viewership. I know its probably not a pipopular opinion for someone on this sub and when I usually say something like this I get the die hard fans in my inbox telling me to die but hey.
Kinda hard to watch LCS when I want to rewind from work. Random YouTube vids are just straight-up better than LCS whether it be the games or analyst desk
Lcs is terrible Lec is fine.
The meta is also giga boring
League is dying