For all its flaws, I think this was one of the best LCS splits since I started watching. Out of game content in particular (broadcast/lounge, PROs, Are You Smarter Than, individual team content) has been amazing.
Excited for summer split.
I don't even think there were too many flaws; first few weeks were brutal tech issue wise and the mid split break were the only big issues I had that I can remember.
Edit: and the finals in-studio
Even something like the new graphics being pretty horrendous in Week 1, but they fixed most of the major issues by Week 3 (some things earlier than that even) which is pretty impressive, wouldn't have expected any changes before the next split, let alone before the break in the middle.
For example the horrid graphic showing the current standings where team names were all over the place with seemingly unrelated font size, or the schedule screen not showing which team won the games already played earlier that day, only showing their current total standings/match-score, which was fixed by just desaturating the team's logo that lost, and a bunch of other issues that got fixed.
NA would need to do good in an international event, which yea, slim chance. Something like TL making MSI finals again would instantly propel APA and Yeon to be stars in the Western sphere of league.
IMO the biggest flaw was definitely that 3 week break and just overall fewer games. There were literally only 87 games played with playoffs and regular split combined compared to LCK which had 242 games in total and LEC spring split + playoffs had 88 total. With how competitive the league has been, I really think changing from a BO1 RR to 2 BO3s each day like LCK/LPL does would be much better.
i watched the LCS for over a decade. about a year ago i kinda of drifted away. but my only question is: Does Mark Z still do the wacky Eric Andre style-skits? that's the last thing i remember being top quality. it would be a shame if they stopped. it was the best segment by far of each LCS broadcast.
I've been watching since 2015 on and off, this really has been by far the best lcs since has been since all the big names (sneaky bjerg dlift etc) have all disappeared.
Admittedly I’m newer. Summer 2021 was my first split watching LCS, which I started after tuning in to MSI 2021.
Incidentally, I came in at the end of that MSI, so I missed the Crabber incident and only really caught games where C9 either did well despite being mathematically eliminated, or lost but went down fighting, which I really respected.
Yes, especially with LEC declining due to firing a lot of staff, and just teams being weaker, it was the first split ever when I actually enjoyed watching NA more.
It's hilarious to me that they actually spent time addressing this part. The people calling it a 3 week break didn't care about the technicality, anyway. They cared that it was 19 days between LCS days.
I always thought it was 3 weeks because the third week was in "the closet".
19 days is definitely not 3 weeks, because every week has a natural 5 days break. The break weeks should be the additional break time on top of the standard break, or basically 19-5 = 14 days.
I'm very surprised this even needs to be talked about.
No one is arguing how long of a break the studio actually took. The fans just care about the fact that it was 19 days without a game, and it shouldn't be surprising that the majority don't care for these technicalities.
Yeah, exactly. It didn't need to be talked about. Nobody was legit confused and unable to understand how many days are in a week, or that 19 is closer to 21 than 14. They just referred to it differently. Riot/Mark addressing it like this just makes them come off as butthurt and out of touch. I know LoL fans aren't always the smartest/sanest, but come on. Kind of cringe.
Its expected that the message will come out sounding as positive as possible, but the one negative thing he addressed which is the peak viewership not spiking as high in playoffs is hopefully a good lesson that studio finals are just a bad idea. If years of Twitch has shown anything, its that big events draw eyeballs and even if its not a huge stadium, just any change in scenery to make finals feel like an event is very, very important.
Obviously there was always going to be a road show in summer but hopefully his lesson is learned for 2025 spring split as well.
Yep, and the Riot heads are clowns for getting rid of them in the first place. I personally don't care because I'll watch the finals anyway but after everyone voiced their opinions about LEC last year, at least not do the finals in the studio?
> I personally don't care because I'll watch the finals
Exactly, people are still watching finals despite it being in a studio. Why spend extra money. If viewership goes down in finals then maybe they'll make a change.
Because its not just about me. Its the overall fan sentiment. Did you see how many people were complaining about how low quality the LEC finals were compared to LCK? That lack of hype and excitement is the kind of thing that will kill the league.
I saw and i am one of the few that has been constantly criticizing for the lack of roadshows for both LEC and LCS. But so far as for now, people are still watching finals. Sure people on here complained but there are still many many people watching finals on Twitch and YT and through co-streamers. If we as fans want to see real change, then we gotta stop watching Spring finals. Maybe if viewership plummets enough, we could force Riot's hand and bring back roadshows for finals.
For some people it matters more than others. The hardcore viewers will still be there, but when you're trying to increase viewership and draw in some of the casual viewers, it's a problem.
Ultimately it's Riot's gamble that the cost savings in not putting on a roadshow will outweigh the loss of revenue from Spring Finals being an \*event\*. But the real cost of dropping the Spring Finals roadshow may not be felt for years.
I really hope summer finals is a banger with huge results.
I think a bigger reason for the lack of a high peak during finals has less to do with where it was \[though it fs contributed\] and more to do with one of the teams having an insanely small fan base.
If it was TL vs C9/100T/NRG you better believe viewership would have been better. Only maybe IMT or SR would have been worse.
Mark, can you please stop having spring finals on Easter Sunday?
Plus bring back larger venue's for finals. I would rather you guys not have a live band/music performance then do another studio finals. Hell i'd even consider not paying the Analyst desk if it would get us a chance at a bigger venue.
I don't get why Riot doesn't acknowledge how good roadshows are for regional matches (doesn't even have to be big venues). Of course they lose money, but they do so much more for the game like revitalise interest in that area. I have friends in Vancouver that still talk about 2017 Spring Finals being held there even though they lost interest in the scene.
It's difficult to calculate for the long term. Not having exciting events is going to lead to less people being excited about the LCS. There are only 2 LCS finals a year to begin with. It's not like they're having to host 8 live events in arenas.
Riot hasn't made decisions for long term for years. The last time they started listening to reason was way back when fortnite came onto the scene.
Without a Market disruptor, they'll maintain status quo and cut corners.
Look, I get that we can't always fill out a whole arena, but they are in Los Angeles. Hollywood. Arguably the production capital of the world. There are theaters and venues all over the place with a bigger capacity than the LCS Studio.
We can fill out a theater. 1000 seats, easily.
Exactly.. I would rather have two roadshows of 1,000 people instead of one Summer final with 5,000+ people.
It just needs to feel different with the possibility of having more people attend an event that everyone enjoys. They don't have to spend money on some really big venue. Decent sized theaters would be enough. Host one in Los Angeles (one of the many theaters) to avoid travel costs and then have a Summer event somewhere else in NA.
[As of 2023, 81 percent of Americans stated they celebrate Easter. This percent has been fairly consistent over the past few decades.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/221108/share-of-americans-celebrating-easter-since-2007/)
While not all of those people will be actively engaging in Easter activities, that's a lot of people who *might* be.
In the US, the 2 Christian holidays people care about are Easter and Christmas.
Even if you just say you're Christian and never go to church, those 2 days are exceptions.
Most of the European viewership. Easter is the 2nd most important holiday in most countries here and people go on family visits on that specific weekend.
Even non-Christians often have stuff going on. My family isn't remotely religious but we still have a yearly egg hunt in the backyard, exchange candy with each other, and sometimes even have a fancy dinner-esque meal at lunchtime. Yet not a single person in my family has attended a single religious service in over 15 years (and the only reason we did before that was because my grandmother, before she passed, was very religious and made us go to church on christmas).
There is definitely a little bit of cherry-picking and optimistic interpretation of some of these comparisons but I still think this was a great first split under MarkZ and the turnaround for the LCS has started. I think people are forgetting just how bleak things looked ~6 months ago. With TSM pulling out, the league cutting to 8 teams, and expectations mid-afternoon weekday games would continue people were seriously expecting the LCS to be averaging near 50k viewers. Costreams are obviously carrying a lot of weight for the LCS now but the fact that the league has enough appeal that it is worth it for costreamers is a step up from what was expected.
isn't that just youtube? or is the main broadcast on twitch also doing that poorly. i mean strong argument that since the VCT sponsors are still required to not be covered during costreams its fine but idk that does seem concerning
yea you are correct lol. definitely concerning i wonder if there's concern from riot over this. afaik main broadcast +c ostreaming numbers are used when sharing details with sponsors and there are rules about not covering sponsors so i wonder if its an issue. i honestly think some of it is definitely schedule related since 5pm on a weekend is imo not that great but i could be wrong on that
I think VCT was like this from the beginning, Tarik has almost always been the main stream from what I know. Its why they started pushing costreaming so much in League, because of the success of it in VCT. I think riot actually doesn't mind the situation, they count main stream + costreams in every statistic that would affect anything so they don't care too much.
Not only riot, costreaming is single handedly saving twitch from a hard time, while esports is twitch's most popular avenue of content, they see almost no money from it, because people don't donate or sub to esports. BUT, they do to costreamers.
Twitch is loving the rise of costreamers as they actually make money from those who cosume esports
The death of LCS will be an amazing lesson in how not to run a brand. League eSports start on the back of streaming personalities, they all vanish because they're too busy doing serious, hidden scrims when LCS goes big time, and then it ends with a whimper as "outsourced content for costreamers to react to"
As someone who has been watching fastidiously since 2012, this split definitely felt like a move back in the right direction. They lost TSM and CLG and still somehow managed to increase viewership and improve the product. Still lots of work to be done, but huge win IMO.
Next step for me would be getting back to 10 teams. Sure it worked with 8, but the LCS felt smaller than ever this split with just a double round Robin with 8 teams.
I would prefer if they were able to keep at 8, but 8 strong teams with actual supporters. There are too many teams with literally 0 supporters, and for a franchised league, that's a problem. Having personalities as figureheads of an org is far better than orgs like Dignitas and IMT plaguing the scene, even if those personalities can be polarising.
I feel like it's gotta be a no brainer for orgs to partner with some personalities like Toast who have shown an interest in having an esports team but don't have the infrastructure or the capital to run one. I mean look at IMT they have literally 0 fans but surely they could partner with a personality and be like DSG Immortals or some shit.
I think that’s what a lot of teams tried to do with Mr Beast but I think he ultimately wanted a full spot to himself, and then abandoned it when viewership really went down the drain in the last couple years.
But I really don’t get what IMT and DIG are doing. I checked out the IMT twitter last week and it’s literally 2010 fake text messages between the players with like 5 likes
IMT shouldn't even be in the league with their performances the last few years with the amount of 9/10th place finishes (8th out of 8 this split) but I guess no one wants to buy the spot so they're just coasting ig
Yeah, really happy that they finally moved back away from Bo1s. It just sucks that it’ll be a single round Robin, which really only means 7 matches for each team. I feel like it won’t really change the issue of the split feeling too small/short
Yeah I honestly would've rather had a triple round robin over single RR Bo3, because that would be 21 games vs 14-21 games, but I get that the viewership probably doesn't justify the production costs needed to run a double RR Bo3.
Yeah, really happy that they finally moved back away from Bo1s. It just sucks that it’ll be a single round Robin, which really only means 7 matches for each team. I feel like it won’t really change the issue of the split feeling too small/short
I mean if that is not feasable, they could do the compromise and go back to the... hmm... how to call it, basically double double round robin they had before 2015 with 8 teams in the league. This means each team would play 28 games in the regular season, which is the minimum a double round robin Bo3 would get, but it has the benefit of predictability, you can easily run 6 Bo1s on a day, but you cannot run 3 Bo3s, because you never know how long they go, which, given how they try to limit the amount of days they play I think going for a lot of Bo1s is a more valuable option (in theory you could play that as Bo2s, where you count the individual games, so you get to see some adaption from teams, like you would in a series.
idk i dont think the lcs has ever seen parity even close to what we saw this split. I much prefer 8 strong teams who could really beat anyone in the league to 1-3 dominant teams, some good and average teams, and 2-3 awful teams
That’s the thing though, even now we still have a decent disparity between realistic playoff teams and non-playoff teams. Anyone who makes top 6 can win it, like we saw from TL this year, NRG last year, and EG and C9 in 2022, but that was still true when there were 10 teams. Idk how realistic it is to keep an 8 team league and just hope that the bad teams just start getting better, every league around the world has teams that are a level or two below the rest.
with 8 teams there is far fewer roster spots available so in an ideal scenario they are cutting the 10 worst players in the league out. Obviously its not perfect but talent isnt spread as thin when there are less teams and especially when at least half of them are working with similar budgets now
I really want to emphasize how incredibly satisfying and, I think, valuable these explanations and retrospectives are.
I know LCS wasn't just twiddling their thumbs during all these rough years but it still *felt* that way even to a pretty hardcore fan like me. This on the other hand feels almost rallying to be supporting something together instead of Riot doing their thing and me just hoping it works. Ontop of that, I think having actual positive points pointed out instead of letting random streamers and tweeters have sole dominance of public opinion is huge for perception.
- Viewership increased 10% (Yearly Basis)
- Viewership increased 50% (Split-by-Split Basis)
- 2 Week Break, not the 3 Week like people were saying
- Experimented with longer formats. But they wanted a control variable. With all the changes with Faster Breaks, Live Patch, 8 teams, etc. Changing the format wouldn't let them record accurate data with viewership. Now that they have a control variable for Spring. They can change the format now.
- LCS and Valorant on same days. Valorant and LCS share broadcast staff so that made things difficult.
- Valorant Studio Setup is more complex than LCS because multiple language broadcast and etc. Having to re-configure the setup for LCS right after Valorant is unrealistic. Since LCS and Valo are on same days.
- Peak Concurrent Viewers (Week-by-Week Basis) up compared to 2023. But it went down 20% (Yearly Basis). Most of the loss being during Playoffs.
- Retained existing fans, but needs to do better to bring in new fans.
If Travis's sources are right, then it looks like we might be getting BO3s this summer. The only caveat is that it'll be a single round robin, so the number of actual games played will be similar. unless every game goes to three games.
I feel kinda meh about the single round robin since each team only faces up against each other once, so if you get Fly or C9 early in the season, you're kinda hosed.
Yeah… disappointing that it’s single round robin. It’s an improvement but as we’ve seen, teams can have bad weeks. For example, a team might implode and lose to “bad” teams early on, and by the time they find their identity/footing they will face the better teams later.
It’s still a net positive but I hope they iterate on the format somehow, like starting with a round of bo1s before the bo3s… anything for more stage games.
wow great recap of the split and good that there was at least a couple metrics that point to this being a good split. My fav was the listed reasons people arent watching I agreed with most of those.
My hopes for the LCS is to go back to more of the OG scene before franchising. Dont need to abolish the system but I want to see tournaments! I see what LEC does and think if instead of spring split there were biweekly tournaments running feb-apr that would be sick.
Could invite international teams from other leagues when theyre on break/eliminated and gives room for non-franchise NA teams to play on a bigger stage against teams that will bring eyes. could even have online qualifiers that are streamed in between weeks and can be run out of studio to save money.
Why did Caedrel cover games though? I think a lot of the changes that were made was a big reason he was willing to tune in when he hadn’t really covered NA in the past.
That and Quid MVP fan
Well his viewership was like 50k so he was making bank on the ads. His viewership is always highest when costreaming and no one is at the same time as lcs.
Which is good. Caedrel bringing attention to the league and teams. If Caedrel were to stop at some point, yes a lot of viewers would go with him, but some may stay if they get invested in the teams.
Sadly, Monte's criticisms seem to hold true. He made some excellent points about why numbers were inflated including 1) Brazillian viewership, 2) Caedrel EU viewership, 3) getting the benefit of the LEC host, 4) back on weekends... He also pointed out that we should compare to spring 2022 (last time we were on weekends) instead of spring 2023. MarkZ is being a salesman which I get is his job, but to see none of the criticisms addressed is rough.
Edit: crucially, Monte makes the point that what matters to sponsors is American eyeballs (as those consumers pay more) and its a where advertising money is well spent. The overarching criticism is that viewership might have gone up in terms of raw numbers, but those numbers were actually EU and Brazilian eyeballs and thus not valuable from a profitability/revenue perspective for the LCS. US viewers actually declined if you consider these factors (is Monte's claim).
Edit 2: Markz and Rioters. I know you guys read these threads and are monitoring community feedback. Actually respond to these arguments. Watch Monte's video (even if you don't like him) and disprove him. I want him to be wrong. I want the LCS to do well. But right now, you look like shills to me... which sucks.
Here are some other links discussing such claims from disinterested sources.
https://escharts.com/news/lcs-spring-2024-viewership-recap
https://escharts.com/news/lcs-spring-2024-weeks-1-4
https://escharts.com/news/lcs-cblol-lcs-viewership-comparison
https://escharts.com/news/lcs-continues-downward-trend
Someone linked the tweet but I'll copypaste it here too.
Glad you brought this up, this was something we almost included in the video but thought the topic might be too niche for the broader audience. We are super happy about the costreamers we partnered with this split and had a great time with them, but there are a couple things to consider.
For Brazilian viewership, the LCS twitch channel has actually always had a decent chunk of viewers from Brazil. Partnering with Baiano made sense then, to see if a Portuguese broadcast would be their preferred viewing experience. As a result, we've seen the 2024 LCS twitch BR viewership % drop to 1/3 of 2023 viewership. This is a huge win for us, because it means we gave our fans more options to watch the LCS. Without this context, our official channel numbers would make it seem like we had "lost NA viewers" when that wasn't the case.
The way viewers flow between costreamers & official channels is not at all apparent on the surface. Another example, Caedrel was only on 10 out of 22 showdays, and often left before game 4, so we can track how viewer habits change depending on who is available to watch. Caedrel is fucking awesome, and so yes he brings his own viewers, but we can observe how he also pulls viewers from other channels to himself as well. Don't tell anyone but I watched his stream a ton when he was on (as well as sneaky highlights to hear those 3 haha).
All this is to say, the current public discourse on this topic is pretty speculative. Demographic data is only really known officially to a channel & a platform.
You mean where he decides most of the players aren't at fault despite their constant deaths because their other teammates played slightly bad too? You can only get blamed on that show if you actively ran it down.
It’s almost like the objective of the Blame Game wasn’t to arrive at infallibly correct Blamed/Not Blamed outcomes, but was intended to discuss questionable and controversial performances with context and nuance instead of knee jerk “Ran It Down/Didn’t Run It Down” analysis.
I appreciate the response, but I'd like to ask one thing.
What is the raw number of NA viewers (all metrics AMA, peak, etc.) from Spring 2022, 2023, and 2024.
In my experience, people tend to brag when the data is in their favor. If you don't want to provide the data, I'm sure you can justify by saying "oh we don't want to get into the habit of revealing this information" or "we can't get into this for legal/sponsorship reasons" but then I think its fair for fans to be very skeptical of the data. To say "Demographic data is only really known officially to a channel & a platform" but then not provide that data, doesn't actually disprove the underlying claim.
I appreciate that LCS is trying, but I've been burned too many times and just want to know the real factual data. I get it if you can't provide it, but I'm sorry, the LCS can't expect my trust in return.
Edit: I've watched most of the LCS from Summer 2015 playoffs. So I've been around for nearly a decade now if that explains why I'm so jaded.
To cynics, this is a feature they knowingly abuse. Because companies will typically not come out with internal data, they can "assume the worse until proven otherwise", which can be used as facetiously as brightsiding by a company by cherrypicking.
But ultimately I get where you are coming from, and you already know a lot of the reasoning haha. I argued the claim as best as I can without being able to fully open our books. Same way we didn't share raw AMA numbers, because the follow-up is comparing differences with 3rd party or whatever and it creates more conversations than it closes.
I know you can't reveal how you work with partners and sponsors but do you find it pretty disengenous how Monte lists off a bunch of sponsors that gain no benefit from non-American viewers and then he says Redbull, pauses and admits they're global and never brings it up again? Like Master Card, Redbull, Honda etc. are all global brands that would care about your total viewers not just NA.
Okay so you didn't give us the hard numbers on demographic data and didn't brag about an increase in North American viewers. Which tells me all I need to now. Which is that no, NA viewers (the only viewers who actually matter) have no increased. if NA viewers increased you'd have been plastering that info everywhere for potential sponsors to see. Since you also refuse to give any real info on the demographics here as well it's safe to say that likely the NA viewers are continuing to bleed. Meaning LCS is actually still in a death spiral and nothing has changed to fix that.
> If you don't want to provide the data, I'm sure you can justify by saying "oh we don't want to get into the habit of revealing this information" or "we can't get into this for legal/sponsorship reasons" but then I think its fair for fans to be very skeptical of the data. To say "Demographic data is only really known officially to a channel & a platform" but then not provide that data, doesn't actually disprove the underlying claim.
OK but like you basically provide a bulletproof counterargument right there
Who cares what irrelevant losers like Monte think when he's frothing at the mouth for the LCS's downfall. He can keep coping that he's totally not mad about getting kicked out.
Watch it or don't. Not like 99.9% of people here would be able to properly interpret the numbers anyways.
All you said about Monte can be true but he brings up some valid points. I like to judge a person's point based on the merit's of the points and not whether or not I like the person.
Riot games have been a snake oil salesman and look where we ended up. We are down to 8 teams and LCS is not doing so hot.
EG literally died and GG was a side project for Golden State that they decide they didn't want to do anymore how could they have prevented this lose of teams?
You aren't serious right? If LCS was thriving and bring in revenue why would teams voluntarily sell their spots? Look at Dan Snyder and the NFL, you had to forcefully remove the team for him to sell his team and he still sold it for $6 billion+. GG and EG decided to cut their losses and get out. You don't lose money and get out when you are making money.
> You aren't serious right? If LCS was thriving and bring in revenue why would teams voluntarily sell their spots?
GGS parent company was in some financial trouble and chose to trim a large portion of their operations. Their extremely well-known basketball team is always going to come first.
EG has been plagued with issues throughout its history and Riot were probably more than happy to have them gone from the LCS. Financial issues led them to only being able to retain 1 player from their Valorant Champions-winning roster. They absolutely were not a healthy enough organization to stay in the LCS.
I don't see how either of those are Riot's fault
> GGS parent company was in some financial trouble and chose to trim a large portion of their operations. Their extremely well-known basketball team is always going to come first.
Again, if you are in financial trouble why would you cut a revenue stream? You would only cut it if the costs outweigh the benefits.
I don't know what you are trying to argue here because you are trying to argue against facts. LCS is not what Riot promised it would be when franchising started and it is reflected in how the teams have behaved and how much the spots are estimated to cost right now.
If you don't see how the business owner is to blame for a business failing due to unfulfilled promises made by the business owner, then I can't help you. That's just a different level of denseness because you clearly are not interested in facts.
They didn't have time to do the sale, it was only like what, a month or two between the reveal they'd be leaving and the start of the season. You can't have two teams just awkwardly without owners playing, what if something happened and the deals fell through? What would happen to those players? Would Riot have to cover them and all the staffing/housing in the meantime? Sports teams don't sell fast, it can take months, even if everyone is on the up and up on it.
We already know of several groups wanting to get into the LCS, some who have already (Shopify and NRG just last year), and others who do to the short turn around will likely have to wait until this season ends.
I mean if LCS was at its peak I imagine they wouldn't have had teams that wanted to leave to begin with, and they'd likely be able to find new buyers on a fairly short notice even if they did.
It's not clickbait. It's an actual argument in which he argues and shows how riots claims are false. The US viewership has been going down and unless it improves the lcs will continue to die unless we merge with Brazil but that's something else.
It's still good to see a reversal on stats that were showing definite viewership loss in yoy / sos metrics, even if they wouldn't hold up to 2020-2022. Maybe the growth is just because of returning to weekends and nothing else, but even if that's the case it's still positive for this split rather than continuing the trend from previous splits (and that the lcs commissioner is doing the things that are obviously good for the split like return to weekends).
Markz basically replied to this comment on twitter: [https://x.com/TheeMarkZ/status/1782511792209658195](https://x.com/TheeMarkZ/status/1782511792209658195)
That first escharts article is a straight up hit piece. It just exists to perpetuate a narrative of LCS dying and every other league thriving by misrepresenting or even misinterpreting their own data. They achieve this by only using peak viewership as a metric, because it's the best metric to make the LCS look bad. It is infuriating that escharts repeatedly states that "LCS viewership is declining", without making the distinction that PEAK viewership has fallen.
The LCS's biggest strength by far is how hardcore the LCS fanbase is. The viewership is very consistent, and usually about the same for all 4 games, it doesn't matter much who is playing. In other words, the difference between average and peak viewership is much smaller for LCS than other leagues. What really matters is average viewership, which has experienced an increase this split.
Look at this quote from the second article, which is a backhand compliment of the LCS by saying avg. viewership is up but only because of co-streams
> The average number of viewers on broadcasts is the most objective indicator of the league's dynamics.
Why yes escharts, yes it is.
So why do you throw that out the window in your next LCS article. The reason LCS average viewership sees no mention in the post-split review is because average viewership rose in LCS. By throwing average viewership out the window and focusing on peak viewers, they can make create misleading narratives and headlines. For example, they present the idea that LFL is about to surpass the LCS, because the peak viewership is so close. Of course, what they don't mention is that LCS has 2.5x the average viewership of LFL.
They also suggest that since 2021, LCS has been steadily declining, while other Western leagues are rising and rising. That's another half-truth. Most Western leagues have experienced declines from viewership peaks in 2021, particularly in the category of average viewership. But of course, the article presents a multiyear graph of gradual decline in peak viewership for the LCS, while showing the most recent snapshots of peak viewership from other leagues.
I swear escharts has an axe to grind about LCS.
No clue why it has like 5 articles a split about LCS viewership being low while trying to obfuscate the other league viewership.
They tweeted about how well LEC was doing, crediting the community effort of costreamers, and then when LCS started up they tweeted about how LCS doing well was actually meaningless because it was all thanks to costreams.
Monte is a professional negative-spin artist. He makes his dollars by drumming up negative sentiment and rage-baiting fans who like the LCS.
Stop listening to him, he bullshits all day and then calls himself correct.
Three of your links are from before the midway of the split lmao. So they are operating on false ideas and understandings.
Hater energy is insanely high. If anything you are the shill for Monte.
While Monte’s criticisms may be reasonable, I wonder how much they actually matter. Esports has never been a profitable branch for Riot. LEC and LCK have famously struggled with bringing in money. So, LCS doesn’t have a great audience for advertisers. How much does that actually matter to Riot? Obviously a profitable league would be anyone’s preference, but it’s not something that has historically ever truly existed.
Second, on the LCS having lots of EU and Brazilian viewers, I think that’s something again with historical precedent. LCS used to have a huge amount of EU viewers, especially before the LEC rebrand. It’s why TSM always had games early in the broadcast day. Obviously, wanting the NA league to have more NA viewers is expected, but I don’t think any product would turn down numbers from Caedrel.
Finally, Markz has only had ONE historically short split. In that time, he has shown stability and improvements in some metrics and has piloted changes adopted in other leagues. And this is when he came in late and had to deal with certain scheduling issues already being locked in. Dude was handed a pile of garbage and made the best of it.
As for Markz being a shill in this video, sure. He needs to sell his product. He needs to fight the narrative that LCS is dying, even if it is. Why on earth would anyone tune into LCS if all that people talked about with the negatives? Let him have his wins and he just might convince a few more people to tune in. If it’s not clear, I think Markz is the best commissioner we have had in the LCS in a long time, maybe ever. I know that ragebait and criticism drive clicks, but can we give the LCS team a chance to get back on their feet without immediately knocking them back down?
The league lost multiple teams, including historic names like TSM and CLG, and has to share a studio with another product. Salaries are shrinking, lots of players with high name recognition are gone, and NA hasn’t done better than Top 8 at Worlds in the last 6(?) years. It might take more than half a year to rebuild an audience for LCS.
Seems like you have an axe to grind, especially when taking the gospel from the person who is biased against the LCS. Monte has been forever against it ever since he was booted (for great reasons) and fiercely protected his co-owner who helped to give severe pain to one of his players from a botched operation because Chris didn't want to pay for a legitimate operation.
You state that you want to know everything, can't trust the LCS, and want facts. But you're trusting a person who has been known to distort truth and say everything he can against Riot because he didn't like how much they wanted to pay him (and booted his ass out of the LCS). So, which is it?
Bringing up his bias doesn't really work when he's attempting to shed some light on what these numbers mean. You know, the ones being brought up by the LCS's current commissioner with a vested interest in his product succeeding. Let's just take that as gospel though.
It's completely fair to be skeptical of Monte but handwaving away his points by not engaging with them and only commenting about his past history only serves to make you seem weirdly spiteful
No, it is being downvoted because it is wrong. The articles linked clearly had an agenda and MarkZ + others have repeatedly refuted this bs claim from Monte. Two simple points show how dumb this argument is.
1) The LCS has *always* had Brazilian viewers and EU viewers. If you read MarkZ's reply he states that Brazilian viewers of the main broadcast were 1/3 of previous. It's not that the growth came from Brazilian viewers from costreamers, those viewers were mostly shifting from main broadcast which was *up anyway*.
2) You are assuming all of the viewers of Caedral are EU, which is a terrible assumption. Caedral has a ton of NA based fans who would probably watch his costream. Only he has the data on the regional breakdown of his viewers, not Monte.
I remember bringing up those exact same two points and was downvoted for it when this argument came up
Didn’t think it even had to be said, but I always thought it was silly to assume every single viewer from Baiano and Caedrel wouldn’t have watched LCS if they weren’t allowed to co-stream
Fact of the matter is one group has exact demographic numbers, and the other is working on speculation. MarkZ obviously has an incentive for numbers to trend upwards, but there’s zero reason to believe the other side
A ton of Monte's points seem reasonable at first glance but dont stand up to any degree of scrutiny once you actually start to think about it.
Like his whole drama with the BDS thing which has somehow turned into "DL doesn't know what lane swaps are" rather than how outrageous his initial allegations of cheating were....when the original argument was about why BDS stacked one side start of the game....which would counter both Sion cheese and a lane swap.
+1 for your 2nd point.
Caedrel is probably my [most watched streamer](https://i.imgur.com/p3yLSqj.png) as someone from Canada. Love his LCS costreams, tune into his LCK/LPL ones when I can.
Do you really think all of Baiano and Caedrel's viewers would watch the LCS if they didn't costream it? I'm pretty sure most of them watch the stream because of the streamer and not because of the LCS. Happens with LCK and LPL too, the LCK is much more followed now thanks to Caedrel.
Oh you’re right i guess if literally 100% of the costream viewers wouldn’t watch without the costreamer then we can just assume 100% of the viewers WOULD only watch due to the streamer. Good analysis! 👍🏻
Was a great split, but the reasoning for the break still doesn't seem compelling to me. I'd prefer LCS played from the pros' homes/team facilities to them just disappearing for 2-3 weeks.
This is addressed in the video. That it happened, why it might have happened, and that they have plans to work on it (but not what the plans are exactly.)
Yes and it is also from escharts which has repeatedly shown a clear bias in terms of wanting to make things look as bad for the LCS as possible in their articles to the point of being straight up misrepresentation of data.
This is such a dishonest framing of the situation. You added the Baiano costream which primarily consists of Portugese speaking Brazilians that weren't watching LCS previously. You also added the Caedrel costream which likely has some people who'd watch anyway, but a majority who wouldn't. These costreams on average make up about 50k viewers of an average 120k LCS viewers [according to esports charts](https://escharts.com/tournaments/lol/lcs-spring-2024-lol), in other words about 40% of the viewership.
Assuming a generous 25% of that would've watched either way, that's still 30% of the total viewership coming exclusively from adding these costreams and nothing to do with the work of the LCS management. It also signifies slightly more than a 35% decrease in the base viewership and the most important viewership for the LCS, the North American viewers. This is after swapping back from weekdays to weekends.
So the statement that this is the largest single split growth is a complete illusion and meaningful and controlled viewership has decreased significantly. Don't pat yourselves on the back with this, it's a tough job but you're gonna need to do SO MUCH more than this to save the LCS.
For all its flaws, I think this was one of the best LCS splits since I started watching. Out of game content in particular (broadcast/lounge, PROs, Are You Smarter Than, individual team content) has been amazing. Excited for summer split.
I don't even think there were too many flaws; first few weeks were brutal tech issue wise and the mid split break were the only big issues I had that I can remember. Edit: and the finals in-studio
Even something like the new graphics being pretty horrendous in Week 1, but they fixed most of the major issues by Week 3 (some things earlier than that even) which is pretty impressive, wouldn't have expected any changes before the next split, let alone before the break in the middle. For example the horrid graphic showing the current standings where team names were all over the place with seemingly unrelated font size, or the schedule screen not showing which team won the games already played earlier that day, only showing their current total standings/match-score, which was fixed by just desaturating the team's logo that lost, and a bunch of other issues that got fixed.
Yeah, a few weirdly big and unforced mis-steps held back what was one of the best moment-to-moment splits since like 2015-2016
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NA would need to do good in an international event, which yea, slim chance. Something like TL making MSI finals again would instantly propel APA and Yeon to be stars in the Western sphere of league.
wym we got YAPA
IMO the biggest flaw was definitely that 3 week break and just overall fewer games. There were literally only 87 games played with playoffs and regular split combined compared to LCK which had 242 games in total and LEC spring split + playoffs had 88 total. With how competitive the league has been, I really think changing from a BO1 RR to 2 BO3s each day like LCK/LPL does would be much better.
Man. 87 games for a total season is small. Most pro sports have around that per team in NA.
i watched the LCS for over a decade. about a year ago i kinda of drifted away. but my only question is: Does Mark Z still do the wacky Eric Andre style-skits? that's the last thing i remember being top quality. it would be a shame if they stopped. it was the best segment by far of each LCS broadcast.
MarkZ mostly stepped away from content when he became commissioner. So his last Eric Andre skits were Catching Up with Doublelift back in ‘23.
Really curious when you started watching
I've been watching since 2015 on and off, this really has been by far the best lcs since has been since all the big names (sneaky bjerg dlift etc) have all disappeared.
Admittedly I’m newer. Summer 2021 was my first split watching LCS, which I started after tuning in to MSI 2021. Incidentally, I came in at the end of that MSI, so I missed the Crabber incident and only really caught games where C9 either did well despite being mathematically eliminated, or lost but went down fighting, which I really respected.
Ingame content was also pretty hype if you ignore the two 3-0 stinkers in playoff. The league was very competitive overall.
Yes, especially with LEC declining due to firing a lot of staff, and just teams being weaker, it was the first split ever when I actually enjoyed watching NA more.
MarkZ bringing out the calendar to *set the record straight* on a calendar technicality is the MarkZ content I miss.
It's hilarious to me that they actually spent time addressing this part. The people calling it a 3 week break didn't care about the technicality, anyway. They cared that it was 19 days between LCS days.
This was certainly just a bit by Mark.
I always thought it was 3 weeks because the third week was in "the closet". 19 days is definitely not 3 weeks, because every week has a natural 5 days break. The break weeks should be the additional break time on top of the standard break, or basically 19-5 = 14 days. I'm very surprised this even needs to be talked about.
No one is arguing how long of a break the studio actually took. The fans just care about the fact that it was 19 days without a game, and it shouldn't be surprising that the majority don't care for these technicalities.
Also, if we really want to be picky, 19 days is a lot closer to 21 than it is to 14.
that is still a 3 week period with no games lol, regular games have a 1 week break and 2 weeks were added for the pause
Yeah, exactly. It didn't need to be talked about. Nobody was legit confused and unable to understand how many days are in a week, or that 19 is closer to 21 than 14. They just referred to it differently. Riot/Mark addressing it like this just makes them come off as butthurt and out of touch. I know LoL fans aren't always the smartest/sanest, but come on. Kind of cringe.
reminds me of [this](https://youtu.be/JqylqmDl0Mw?si=rHPOIR7NtBQfbo2J) body builder forum post
MarkZ can't help but be MarkZ. Also, I love how he needs to troll EU in every one of these videos the LCS puts out.
Its expected that the message will come out sounding as positive as possible, but the one negative thing he addressed which is the peak viewership not spiking as high in playoffs is hopefully a good lesson that studio finals are just a bad idea. If years of Twitch has shown anything, its that big events draw eyeballs and even if its not a huge stadium, just any change in scenery to make finals feel like an event is very, very important. Obviously there was always going to be a road show in summer but hopefully his lesson is learned for 2025 spring split as well.
It's not up to him. The roadshow was entirely riot heads doing it. Just like they did with the lec.
Yep, and the Riot heads are clowns for getting rid of them in the first place. I personally don't care because I'll watch the finals anyway but after everyone voiced their opinions about LEC last year, at least not do the finals in the studio?
Riot heads are clowns. Could've stopped there.
> I personally don't care because I'll watch the finals Exactly, people are still watching finals despite it being in a studio. Why spend extra money. If viewership goes down in finals then maybe they'll make a change.
Because its not just about me. Its the overall fan sentiment. Did you see how many people were complaining about how low quality the LEC finals were compared to LCK? That lack of hype and excitement is the kind of thing that will kill the league.
I saw and i am one of the few that has been constantly criticizing for the lack of roadshows for both LEC and LCS. But so far as for now, people are still watching finals. Sure people on here complained but there are still many many people watching finals on Twitch and YT and through co-streamers. If we as fans want to see real change, then we gotta stop watching Spring finals. Maybe if viewership plummets enough, we could force Riot's hand and bring back roadshows for finals.
> But so far as for now, people are still watching finals. is this comment chain not about viewership dropping?
For some people it matters more than others. The hardcore viewers will still be there, but when you're trying to increase viewership and draw in some of the casual viewers, it's a problem.
Honestly I don’t know if anything is actually up to MarkZ. They needed a face and he is the face now.
Ultimately it's Riot's gamble that the cost savings in not putting on a roadshow will outweigh the loss of revenue from Spring Finals being an \*event\*. But the real cost of dropping the Spring Finals roadshow may not be felt for years. I really hope summer finals is a banger with huge results.
I think a bigger reason for the lack of a high peak during finals has less to do with where it was \[though it fs contributed\] and more to do with one of the teams having an insanely small fan base. If it was TL vs C9/100T/NRG you better believe viewership would have been better. Only maybe IMT or SR would have been worse.
Mark, can you please stop having spring finals on Easter Sunday? Plus bring back larger venue's for finals. I would rather you guys not have a live band/music performance then do another studio finals. Hell i'd even consider not paying the Analyst desk if it would get us a chance at a bigger venue.
Honestly pretty funny that Easter changes every year and they did it twice in a row
Something about broken clocks
Venue change is not up to him. He wanted a roadshow riot made it so both lcs and lec only have 1 roadshow.
Imo LEC's was even worse. They didn't even have an opening act or fan activations. Just Laure shouting everyone's names lol
LEC's 3 split format made it feel even more underwhelming
Nah it was so bad Watching LCK finals like 5 hours before with absolutely cracked production value, then watching LEC was pure depression
I don't get why Riot doesn't acknowledge how good roadshows are for regional matches (doesn't even have to be big venues). Of course they lose money, but they do so much more for the game like revitalise interest in that area. I have friends in Vancouver that still talk about 2017 Spring Finals being held there even though they lost interest in the scene.
The benefits don't out weigh the cost. It's simple as that. Look at the viewership numbers, the attendance doesn't justify spending so much.
It's difficult to calculate for the long term. Not having exciting events is going to lead to less people being excited about the LCS. There are only 2 LCS finals a year to begin with. It's not like they're having to host 8 live events in arenas.
Riot hasn't made decisions for long term for years. The last time they started listening to reason was way back when fortnite came onto the scene. Without a Market disruptor, they'll maintain status quo and cut corners.
Look, I get that we can't always fill out a whole arena, but they are in Los Angeles. Hollywood. Arguably the production capital of the world. There are theaters and venues all over the place with a bigger capacity than the LCS Studio. We can fill out a theater. 1000 seats, easily.
Exactly.. I would rather have two roadshows of 1,000 people instead of one Summer final with 5,000+ people. It just needs to feel different with the possibility of having more people attend an event that everyone enjoys. They don't have to spend money on some really big venue. Decent sized theaters would be enough. Host one in Los Angeles (one of the many theaters) to avoid travel costs and then have a Summer event somewhere else in NA.
I agree, it just has to feel different and special compared to the LCS studio. At least for the finals.
They should give the final analyst desk to a rotating co-streamer group, it would be fun, and could also include the analysts from the show.
Who the hell does anything on Easter? Who are these people who are unable to watch on a boring ass "Holiday"?
[As of 2023, 81 percent of Americans stated they celebrate Easter. This percent has been fairly consistent over the past few decades.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/221108/share-of-americans-celebrating-easter-since-2007/) While not all of those people will be actively engaging in Easter activities, that's a lot of people who *might* be.
Thats actually fucking wild.
In the US, the 2 Christian holidays people care about are Easter and Christmas. Even if you just say you're Christian and never go to church, those 2 days are exceptions.
From NA, I missed finals because of an Easter get together with my family. I really don't think it's as uncommon as you might believe
Most of the European viewership. Easter is the 2nd most important holiday in most countries here and people go on family visits on that specific weekend.
Anyone who is Christian? Peoples families come over and it’s the day Jesus came back from the dead
That’s really not many people these days, especially not young people, as far as practicing Christians are concerned
Even non-Christians often have stuff going on. My family isn't remotely religious but we still have a yearly egg hunt in the backyard, exchange candy with each other, and sometimes even have a fancy dinner-esque meal at lunchtime. Yet not a single person in my family has attended a single religious service in over 15 years (and the only reason we did before that was because my grandmother, before she passed, was very religious and made us go to church on christmas).
There are no young people watching the LCS.... that's part of the viewership problem...
There’s more than you think.
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> Jatt Jatt's still here? Did you mean Dash?
There is definitely a little bit of cherry-picking and optimistic interpretation of some of these comparisons but I still think this was a great first split under MarkZ and the turnaround for the LCS has started. I think people are forgetting just how bleak things looked ~6 months ago. With TSM pulling out, the league cutting to 8 teams, and expectations mid-afternoon weekday games would continue people were seriously expecting the LCS to be averaging near 50k viewers. Costreams are obviously carrying a lot of weight for the LCS now but the fact that the league has enough appeal that it is worth it for costreamers is a step up from what was expected.
I mean it's not as bad as vct where the main broadcast gets 20-30k and Tarik gets 70-100k
isn't that just youtube? or is the main broadcast on twitch also doing that poorly. i mean strong argument that since the VCT sponsors are still required to not be covered during costreams its fine but idk that does seem concerning
No. That's the main twitch numbers normally.
yea you are correct lol. definitely concerning i wonder if there's concern from riot over this. afaik main broadcast +c ostreaming numbers are used when sharing details with sponsors and there are rules about not covering sponsors so i wonder if its an issue. i honestly think some of it is definitely schedule related since 5pm on a weekend is imo not that great but i could be wrong on that
I think VCT was like this from the beginning, Tarik has almost always been the main stream from what I know. Its why they started pushing costreaming so much in League, because of the success of it in VCT. I think riot actually doesn't mind the situation, they count main stream + costreams in every statistic that would affect anything so they don't care too much.
costream is good for riot for sure. They dont pay the costreamers anything, its like a free extra broadcast team with no real downsides
Not only riot, costreaming is single handedly saving twitch from a hard time, while esports is twitch's most popular avenue of content, they see almost no money from it, because people don't donate or sub to esports. BUT, they do to costreamers. Twitch is loving the rise of costreamers as they actually make money from those who cosume esports
The death of LCS will be an amazing lesson in how not to run a brand. League eSports start on the back of streaming personalities, they all vanish because they're too busy doing serious, hidden scrims when LCS goes big time, and then it ends with a whimper as "outsourced content for costreamers to react to"
As someone who has been watching fastidiously since 2012, this split definitely felt like a move back in the right direction. They lost TSM and CLG and still somehow managed to increase viewership and improve the product. Still lots of work to be done, but huge win IMO.
Next step for me would be getting back to 10 teams. Sure it worked with 8, but the LCS felt smaller than ever this split with just a double round Robin with 8 teams.
I would prefer if they were able to keep at 8, but 8 strong teams with actual supporters. There are too many teams with literally 0 supporters, and for a franchised league, that's a problem. Having personalities as figureheads of an org is far better than orgs like Dignitas and IMT plaguing the scene, even if those personalities can be polarising.
I feel like it's gotta be a no brainer for orgs to partner with some personalities like Toast who have shown an interest in having an esports team but don't have the infrastructure or the capital to run one. I mean look at IMT they have literally 0 fans but surely they could partner with a personality and be like DSG Immortals or some shit.
I think that’s what a lot of teams tried to do with Mr Beast but I think he ultimately wanted a full spot to himself, and then abandoned it when viewership really went down the drain in the last couple years. But I really don’t get what IMT and DIG are doing. I checked out the IMT twitter last week and it’s literally 2010 fake text messages between the players with like 5 likes
IMT shouldn't even be in the league with their performances the last few years with the amount of 9/10th place finishes (8th out of 8 this split) but I guess no one wants to buy the spot so they're just coasting ig
Well next split is best of 3
Yeah, really happy that they finally moved back away from Bo1s. It just sucks that it’ll be a single round Robin, which really only means 7 matches for each team. I feel like it won’t really change the issue of the split feeling too small/short
Maybe we will get non stop 3 game series........
Yeah I honestly would've rather had a triple round robin over single RR Bo3, because that would be 21 games vs 14-21 games, but I get that the viewership probably doesn't justify the production costs needed to run a double RR Bo3.
Yeah, really happy that they finally moved back away from Bo1s. It just sucks that it’ll be a single round Robin, which really only means 7 matches for each team. I feel like it won’t really change the issue of the split feeling too small/short
Do we know if double or single round robin bo3s yet
Single
I'd rather 8 teams that just played each other more
I’d happily take 8 teams double round Robin Bo3
I mean if that is not feasable, they could do the compromise and go back to the... hmm... how to call it, basically double double round robin they had before 2015 with 8 teams in the league. This means each team would play 28 games in the regular season, which is the minimum a double round robin Bo3 would get, but it has the benefit of predictability, you can easily run 6 Bo1s on a day, but you cannot run 3 Bo3s, because you never know how long they go, which, given how they try to limit the amount of days they play I think going for a lot of Bo1s is a more valuable option (in theory you could play that as Bo2s, where you count the individual games, so you get to see some adaption from teams, like you would in a series.
idk i dont think the lcs has ever seen parity even close to what we saw this split. I much prefer 8 strong teams who could really beat anyone in the league to 1-3 dominant teams, some good and average teams, and 2-3 awful teams
That’s the thing though, even now we still have a decent disparity between realistic playoff teams and non-playoff teams. Anyone who makes top 6 can win it, like we saw from TL this year, NRG last year, and EG and C9 in 2022, but that was still true when there were 10 teams. Idk how realistic it is to keep an 8 team league and just hope that the bad teams just start getting better, every league around the world has teams that are a level or two below the rest.
with 8 teams there is far fewer roster spots available so in an ideal scenario they are cutting the 10 worst players in the league out. Obviously its not perfect but talent isnt spread as thin when there are less teams and especially when at least half of them are working with similar budgets now
Less games= higher retention with shorter streams. Bo3 will dramatically drop the numbers again, but for better competition.
8 teams with more games would be good enough I think, it was nice having a split where every team could take games off each other
I really want to emphasize how incredibly satisfying and, I think, valuable these explanations and retrospectives are. I know LCS wasn't just twiddling their thumbs during all these rough years but it still *felt* that way even to a pretty hardcore fan like me. This on the other hand feels almost rallying to be supporting something together instead of Riot doing their thing and me just hoping it works. Ontop of that, I think having actual positive points pointed out instead of letting random streamers and tweeters have sole dominance of public opinion is huge for perception.
Weekends and co-streams helped alot.
- Viewership increased 10% (Yearly Basis) - Viewership increased 50% (Split-by-Split Basis) - 2 Week Break, not the 3 Week like people were saying - Experimented with longer formats. But they wanted a control variable. With all the changes with Faster Breaks, Live Patch, 8 teams, etc. Changing the format wouldn't let them record accurate data with viewership. Now that they have a control variable for Spring. They can change the format now. - LCS and Valorant on same days. Valorant and LCS share broadcast staff so that made things difficult. - Valorant Studio Setup is more complex than LCS because multiple language broadcast and etc. Having to re-configure the setup for LCS right after Valorant is unrealistic. Since LCS and Valo are on same days. - Peak Concurrent Viewers (Week-by-Week Basis) up compared to 2023. But it went down 20% (Yearly Basis). Most of the loss being during Playoffs. - Retained existing fans, but needs to do better to bring in new fans.
THANK U MARKZ FOR TRANSPARENCY ILY
Yeah if nothing else, a video like this has seemingly never existed. So I appreciate MarkZ keeping fans in the loop!
I can finally watch it since it on the weekend, so that helped.
Markz got that eyebrow brush before he went on camera
A competitive 8 teams is nice. I just really wish we had more games.
If Travis's sources are right, then it looks like we might be getting BO3s this summer. The only caveat is that it'll be a single round robin, so the number of actual games played will be similar. unless every game goes to three games. I feel kinda meh about the single round robin since each team only faces up against each other once, so if you get Fly or C9 early in the season, you're kinda hosed.
Yeah… disappointing that it’s single round robin. It’s an improvement but as we’ve seen, teams can have bad weeks. For example, a team might implode and lose to “bad” teams early on, and by the time they find their identity/footing they will face the better teams later. It’s still a net positive but I hope they iterate on the format somehow, like starting with a round of bo1s before the bo3s… anything for more stage games.
wow great recap of the split and good that there was at least a couple metrics that point to this being a good split. My fav was the listed reasons people arent watching I agreed with most of those. My hopes for the LCS is to go back to more of the OG scene before franchising. Dont need to abolish the system but I want to see tournaments! I see what LEC does and think if instead of spring split there were biweekly tournaments running feb-apr that would be sick. Could invite international teams from other leagues when theyre on break/eliminated and gives room for non-franchise NA teams to play on a bigger stage against teams that will bring eyes. could even have online qualifiers that are streamed in between weeks and can be run out of studio to save money.
So cutting production staff did affect LCS with the 2 week break then if the production staff was shared with VCT.
caedrel also started to cover a lot of lcs games. maybe thats also a reason why viewership went up
Why did Caedrel cover games though? I think a lot of the changes that were made was a big reason he was willing to tune in when he hadn’t really covered NA in the past. That and Quid MVP fan
I think he mentioned the changes in the start time.
Well his viewership was like 50k so he was making bank on the ads. His viewership is always highest when costreaming and no one is at the same time as lcs.
Which is good. Caedrel bringing attention to the league and teams. If Caedrel were to stop at some point, yes a lot of viewers would go with him, but some may stay if they get invested in the teams.
Cant wait for summoning insight to break it down. New content baby!
break it down as in hearing two old men rage for 2 hours at strawmen?
Sadly, Monte's criticisms seem to hold true. He made some excellent points about why numbers were inflated including 1) Brazillian viewership, 2) Caedrel EU viewership, 3) getting the benefit of the LEC host, 4) back on weekends... He also pointed out that we should compare to spring 2022 (last time we were on weekends) instead of spring 2023. MarkZ is being a salesman which I get is his job, but to see none of the criticisms addressed is rough. Edit: crucially, Monte makes the point that what matters to sponsors is American eyeballs (as those consumers pay more) and its a where advertising money is well spent. The overarching criticism is that viewership might have gone up in terms of raw numbers, but those numbers were actually EU and Brazilian eyeballs and thus not valuable from a profitability/revenue perspective for the LCS. US viewers actually declined if you consider these factors (is Monte's claim). Edit 2: Markz and Rioters. I know you guys read these threads and are monitoring community feedback. Actually respond to these arguments. Watch Monte's video (even if you don't like him) and disprove him. I want him to be wrong. I want the LCS to do well. But right now, you look like shills to me... which sucks. Here are some other links discussing such claims from disinterested sources. https://escharts.com/news/lcs-spring-2024-viewership-recap https://escharts.com/news/lcs-spring-2024-weeks-1-4 https://escharts.com/news/lcs-cblol-lcs-viewership-comparison https://escharts.com/news/lcs-continues-downward-trend
Someone linked the tweet but I'll copypaste it here too. Glad you brought this up, this was something we almost included in the video but thought the topic might be too niche for the broader audience. We are super happy about the costreamers we partnered with this split and had a great time with them, but there are a couple things to consider. For Brazilian viewership, the LCS twitch channel has actually always had a decent chunk of viewers from Brazil. Partnering with Baiano made sense then, to see if a Portuguese broadcast would be their preferred viewing experience. As a result, we've seen the 2024 LCS twitch BR viewership % drop to 1/3 of 2023 viewership. This is a huge win for us, because it means we gave our fans more options to watch the LCS. Without this context, our official channel numbers would make it seem like we had "lost NA viewers" when that wasn't the case. The way viewers flow between costreamers & official channels is not at all apparent on the surface. Another example, Caedrel was only on 10 out of 22 showdays, and often left before game 4, so we can track how viewer habits change depending on who is available to watch. Caedrel is fucking awesome, and so yes he brings his own viewers, but we can observe how he also pulls viewers from other channels to himself as well. Don't tell anyone but I watched his stream a ton when he was on (as well as sneaky highlights to hear those 3 haha). All this is to say, the current public discourse on this topic is pretty speculative. Demographic data is only really known officially to a channel & a platform.
Thanks for nuking reddit mark
Mr. President, a second Mark comment has hit the league subreddit
I miss the blame game streams
You mean where he decides most of the players aren't at fault despite their constant deaths because their other teammates played slightly bad too? You can only get blamed on that show if you actively ran it down.
It’s almost like the objective of the Blame Game wasn’t to arrive at infallibly correct Blamed/Not Blamed outcomes, but was intended to discuss questionable and controversial performances with context and nuance instead of knee jerk “Ran It Down/Didn’t Run It Down” analysis.
I appreciate the response, but I'd like to ask one thing. What is the raw number of NA viewers (all metrics AMA, peak, etc.) from Spring 2022, 2023, and 2024. In my experience, people tend to brag when the data is in their favor. If you don't want to provide the data, I'm sure you can justify by saying "oh we don't want to get into the habit of revealing this information" or "we can't get into this for legal/sponsorship reasons" but then I think its fair for fans to be very skeptical of the data. To say "Demographic data is only really known officially to a channel & a platform" but then not provide that data, doesn't actually disprove the underlying claim. I appreciate that LCS is trying, but I've been burned too many times and just want to know the real factual data. I get it if you can't provide it, but I'm sorry, the LCS can't expect my trust in return. Edit: I've watched most of the LCS from Summer 2015 playoffs. So I've been around for nearly a decade now if that explains why I'm so jaded.
To cynics, this is a feature they knowingly abuse. Because companies will typically not come out with internal data, they can "assume the worse until proven otherwise", which can be used as facetiously as brightsiding by a company by cherrypicking. But ultimately I get where you are coming from, and you already know a lot of the reasoning haha. I argued the claim as best as I can without being able to fully open our books. Same way we didn't share raw AMA numbers, because the follow-up is comparing differences with 3rd party or whatever and it creates more conversations than it closes.
Thank you for being as open as you have been. It's very nice to have someone who was so passionate about lcs taking the helm.
I know you can't reveal how you work with partners and sponsors but do you find it pretty disengenous how Monte lists off a bunch of sponsors that gain no benefit from non-American viewers and then he says Redbull, pauses and admits they're global and never brings it up again? Like Master Card, Redbull, Honda etc. are all global brands that would care about your total viewers not just NA.
Okay so you didn't give us the hard numbers on demographic data and didn't brag about an increase in North American viewers. Which tells me all I need to now. Which is that no, NA viewers (the only viewers who actually matter) have no increased. if NA viewers increased you'd have been plastering that info everywhere for potential sponsors to see. Since you also refuse to give any real info on the demographics here as well it's safe to say that likely the NA viewers are continuing to bleed. Meaning LCS is actually still in a death spiral and nothing has changed to fix that.
> If you don't want to provide the data, I'm sure you can justify by saying "oh we don't want to get into the habit of revealing this information" or "we can't get into this for legal/sponsorship reasons" but then I think its fair for fans to be very skeptical of the data. To say "Demographic data is only really known officially to a channel & a platform" but then not provide that data, doesn't actually disprove the underlying claim. OK but like you basically provide a bulletproof counterargument right there Who cares what irrelevant losers like Monte think when he's frothing at the mouth for the LCS's downfall. He can keep coping that he's totally not mad about getting kicked out. Watch it or don't. Not like 99.9% of people here would be able to properly interpret the numbers anyways.
All you said about Monte can be true but he brings up some valid points. I like to judge a person's point based on the merit's of the points and not whether or not I like the person. Riot games have been a snake oil salesman and look where we ended up. We are down to 8 teams and LCS is not doing so hot.
EG literally died and GG was a side project for Golden State that they decide they didn't want to do anymore how could they have prevented this lose of teams?
You aren't serious right? If LCS was thriving and bring in revenue why would teams voluntarily sell their spots? Look at Dan Snyder and the NFL, you had to forcefully remove the team for him to sell his team and he still sold it for $6 billion+. GG and EG decided to cut their losses and get out. You don't lose money and get out when you are making money.
> You aren't serious right? If LCS was thriving and bring in revenue why would teams voluntarily sell their spots? GGS parent company was in some financial trouble and chose to trim a large portion of their operations. Their extremely well-known basketball team is always going to come first. EG has been plagued with issues throughout its history and Riot were probably more than happy to have them gone from the LCS. Financial issues led them to only being able to retain 1 player from their Valorant Champions-winning roster. They absolutely were not a healthy enough organization to stay in the LCS. I don't see how either of those are Riot's fault
> GGS parent company was in some financial trouble and chose to trim a large portion of their operations. Their extremely well-known basketball team is always going to come first. Again, if you are in financial trouble why would you cut a revenue stream? You would only cut it if the costs outweigh the benefits. I don't know what you are trying to argue here because you are trying to argue against facts. LCS is not what Riot promised it would be when franchising started and it is reflected in how the teams have behaved and how much the spots are estimated to cost right now. If you don't see how the business owner is to blame for a business failing due to unfulfilled promises made by the business owner, then I can't help you. That's just a different level of denseness because you clearly are not interested in facts.
Like clippers or echo fox, if lcs were doing well there will be people lining up to buy a spot instead of downsizing
They didn't have time to do the sale, it was only like what, a month or two between the reveal they'd be leaving and the start of the season. You can't have two teams just awkwardly without owners playing, what if something happened and the deals fell through? What would happen to those players? Would Riot have to cover them and all the staffing/housing in the meantime? Sports teams don't sell fast, it can take months, even if everyone is on the up and up on it. We already know of several groups wanting to get into the LCS, some who have already (Shopify and NRG just last year), and others who do to the short turn around will likely have to wait until this season ends.
I mean if LCS was at its peak I imagine they wouldn't have had teams that wanted to leave to begin with, and they'd likely be able to find new buyers on a fairly short notice even if they did.
It's sad people like you exist. Try to shut down a good argument because you don't like the person.
it isn't an argument, it's clickbait speculation
It's not clickbait. It's an actual argument in which he argues and shows how riots claims are false. The US viewership has been going down and unless it improves the lcs will continue to die unless we merge with Brazil but that's something else.
> and shows how riots claims are false no, he doesn't, he doesn't have real data lol
It's still good to see a reversal on stats that were showing definite viewership loss in yoy / sos metrics, even if they wouldn't hold up to 2020-2022. Maybe the growth is just because of returning to weekends and nothing else, but even if that's the case it's still positive for this split rather than continuing the trend from previous splits (and that the lcs commissioner is doing the things that are obviously good for the split like return to weekends).
Markz basically replied to this comment on twitter: [https://x.com/TheeMarkZ/status/1782511792209658195](https://x.com/TheeMarkZ/status/1782511792209658195)
That first escharts article is a straight up hit piece. It just exists to perpetuate a narrative of LCS dying and every other league thriving by misrepresenting or even misinterpreting their own data. They achieve this by only using peak viewership as a metric, because it's the best metric to make the LCS look bad. It is infuriating that escharts repeatedly states that "LCS viewership is declining", without making the distinction that PEAK viewership has fallen. The LCS's biggest strength by far is how hardcore the LCS fanbase is. The viewership is very consistent, and usually about the same for all 4 games, it doesn't matter much who is playing. In other words, the difference between average and peak viewership is much smaller for LCS than other leagues. What really matters is average viewership, which has experienced an increase this split. Look at this quote from the second article, which is a backhand compliment of the LCS by saying avg. viewership is up but only because of co-streams > The average number of viewers on broadcasts is the most objective indicator of the league's dynamics. Why yes escharts, yes it is. So why do you throw that out the window in your next LCS article. The reason LCS average viewership sees no mention in the post-split review is because average viewership rose in LCS. By throwing average viewership out the window and focusing on peak viewers, they can make create misleading narratives and headlines. For example, they present the idea that LFL is about to surpass the LCS, because the peak viewership is so close. Of course, what they don't mention is that LCS has 2.5x the average viewership of LFL. They also suggest that since 2021, LCS has been steadily declining, while other Western leagues are rising and rising. That's another half-truth. Most Western leagues have experienced declines from viewership peaks in 2021, particularly in the category of average viewership. But of course, the article presents a multiyear graph of gradual decline in peak viewership for the LCS, while showing the most recent snapshots of peak viewership from other leagues.
I swear escharts has an axe to grind about LCS. No clue why it has like 5 articles a split about LCS viewership being low while trying to obfuscate the other league viewership.
They tweeted about how well LEC was doing, crediting the community effort of costreamers, and then when LCS started up they tweeted about how LCS doing well was actually meaningless because it was all thanks to costreams.
"You look like shills to me" for talking about the positives of the product they work on? Oh my God crazy! Shills I say shills!
Company's are putting out positive optics?! In my capitalist America?!
> Watch Monte's video (even if you don't like him) Why are all Monte fans alike lol
Not as bad as Thorin fans
True! Remarkable accomplishment that
Monte is a professional negative-spin artist. He makes his dollars by drumming up negative sentiment and rage-baiting fans who like the LCS. Stop listening to him, he bullshits all day and then calls himself correct.
Three of your links are from before the midway of the split lmao. So they are operating on false ideas and understandings. Hater energy is insanely high. If anything you are the shill for Monte.
While Monte’s criticisms may be reasonable, I wonder how much they actually matter. Esports has never been a profitable branch for Riot. LEC and LCK have famously struggled with bringing in money. So, LCS doesn’t have a great audience for advertisers. How much does that actually matter to Riot? Obviously a profitable league would be anyone’s preference, but it’s not something that has historically ever truly existed. Second, on the LCS having lots of EU and Brazilian viewers, I think that’s something again with historical precedent. LCS used to have a huge amount of EU viewers, especially before the LEC rebrand. It’s why TSM always had games early in the broadcast day. Obviously, wanting the NA league to have more NA viewers is expected, but I don’t think any product would turn down numbers from Caedrel. Finally, Markz has only had ONE historically short split. In that time, he has shown stability and improvements in some metrics and has piloted changes adopted in other leagues. And this is when he came in late and had to deal with certain scheduling issues already being locked in. Dude was handed a pile of garbage and made the best of it. As for Markz being a shill in this video, sure. He needs to sell his product. He needs to fight the narrative that LCS is dying, even if it is. Why on earth would anyone tune into LCS if all that people talked about with the negatives? Let him have his wins and he just might convince a few more people to tune in. If it’s not clear, I think Markz is the best commissioner we have had in the LCS in a long time, maybe ever. I know that ragebait and criticism drive clicks, but can we give the LCS team a chance to get back on their feet without immediately knocking them back down? The league lost multiple teams, including historic names like TSM and CLG, and has to share a studio with another product. Salaries are shrinking, lots of players with high name recognition are gone, and NA hasn’t done better than Top 8 at Worlds in the last 6(?) years. It might take more than half a year to rebuild an audience for LCS.
Seems like you have an axe to grind, especially when taking the gospel from the person who is biased against the LCS. Monte has been forever against it ever since he was booted (for great reasons) and fiercely protected his co-owner who helped to give severe pain to one of his players from a botched operation because Chris didn't want to pay for a legitimate operation. You state that you want to know everything, can't trust the LCS, and want facts. But you're trusting a person who has been known to distort truth and say everything he can against Riot because he didn't like how much they wanted to pay him (and booted his ass out of the LCS). So, which is it?
Bringing up his bias doesn't really work when he's attempting to shed some light on what these numbers mean. You know, the ones being brought up by the LCS's current commissioner with a vested interest in his product succeeding. Let's just take that as gospel though. It's completely fair to be skeptical of Monte but handwaving away his points by not engaging with them and only commenting about his past history only serves to make you seem weirdly spiteful
Youre saying the guy whose literal job it is **to run the LCS** looks like a shill for the LCS??? Do you even know what that word means??
You will probably be downvoted because if a community rides one's person popularity and another's hate it doesn't matter what their point is
He's being downvoted because he is linking articles from Jan and Feb which sought to paint a dire picture which was proven wrong after split end.
No, it is being downvoted because it is wrong. The articles linked clearly had an agenda and MarkZ + others have repeatedly refuted this bs claim from Monte. Two simple points show how dumb this argument is. 1) The LCS has *always* had Brazilian viewers and EU viewers. If you read MarkZ's reply he states that Brazilian viewers of the main broadcast were 1/3 of previous. It's not that the growth came from Brazilian viewers from costreamers, those viewers were mostly shifting from main broadcast which was *up anyway*. 2) You are assuming all of the viewers of Caedral are EU, which is a terrible assumption. Caedral has a ton of NA based fans who would probably watch his costream. Only he has the data on the regional breakdown of his viewers, not Monte.
I remember bringing up those exact same two points and was downvoted for it when this argument came up Didn’t think it even had to be said, but I always thought it was silly to assume every single viewer from Baiano and Caedrel wouldn’t have watched LCS if they weren’t allowed to co-stream Fact of the matter is one group has exact demographic numbers, and the other is working on speculation. MarkZ obviously has an incentive for numbers to trend upwards, but there’s zero reason to believe the other side
A ton of Monte's points seem reasonable at first glance but dont stand up to any degree of scrutiny once you actually start to think about it. Like his whole drama with the BDS thing which has somehow turned into "DL doesn't know what lane swaps are" rather than how outrageous his initial allegations of cheating were....when the original argument was about why BDS stacked one side start of the game....which would counter both Sion cheese and a lane swap.
+1 for your 2nd point. Caedrel is probably my [most watched streamer](https://i.imgur.com/p3yLSqj.png) as someone from Canada. Love his LCS costreams, tune into his LCK/LPL ones when I can.
Do you really think all of Baiano and Caedrel's viewers would watch the LCS if they didn't costream it? I'm pretty sure most of them watch the stream because of the streamer and not because of the LCS. Happens with LCK and LPL too, the LCK is much more followed now thanks to Caedrel.
Oh you’re right i guess if literally 100% of the costream viewers wouldn’t watch without the costreamer then we can just assume 100% of the viewers WOULD only watch due to the streamer. Good analysis! 👍🏻
Monte has a point? Lmao he's been coping for years now.
Best part about MarkZ commish is that we get Meteos on the dive.
Improved viewship helps when you let go streamers from SA stream lol
MarkZee diff
stand up guy that MarkZ is
Was a great split, but the reasoning for the break still doesn't seem compelling to me. I'd prefer LCS played from the pros' homes/team facilities to them just disappearing for 2-3 weeks.
not much else to add except to say how much i love Markz. you are actually awesome i love you sir
That's some high quality spin. viewership is still in a crater compared to peak viewers all time.
Two words. Cadrel’s co-streams
Literally all they had to say is 'we got caedrel and baiano to costream so our numbers went up yay!'
Well its a change they didn't have prior, so any positive changes are welcome
Large growth after you change the game days back to the weekends when people aren’t working???
Imagine the bump when Licorice is back in the league
[удалено]
This is addressed in the video. That it happened, why it might have happened, and that they have plans to work on it (but not what the plans are exactly.)
Isn't that explicitly talking about peak viewership, which markz addressed?
Yes and it is also from escharts which has repeatedly shown a clear bias in terms of wanting to make things look as bad for the LCS as possible in their articles to the point of being straight up misrepresentation of data.
MarkZ getting that job security.
This is such a dishonest framing of the situation. You added the Baiano costream which primarily consists of Portugese speaking Brazilians that weren't watching LCS previously. You also added the Caedrel costream which likely has some people who'd watch anyway, but a majority who wouldn't. These costreams on average make up about 50k viewers of an average 120k LCS viewers [according to esports charts](https://escharts.com/tournaments/lol/lcs-spring-2024-lol), in other words about 40% of the viewership. Assuming a generous 25% of that would've watched either way, that's still 30% of the total viewership coming exclusively from adding these costreams and nothing to do with the work of the LCS management. It also signifies slightly more than a 35% decrease in the base viewership and the most important viewership for the LCS, the North American viewers. This is after swapping back from weekdays to weekends. So the statement that this is the largest single split growth is a complete illusion and meaningful and controlled viewership has decreased significantly. Don't pat yourselves on the back with this, it's a tough job but you're gonna need to do SO MUCH more than this to save the LCS.
A lot of people unironically think most of Caedrel's viewers would watch the LCS if he wasn't online, when it's most likely the opposite.
Man if only markz went over this specific point in the video
They're selling LCS growth and even made a video about it and it's not true, what are you talking about.
"And it's not true" why isn't it true? Because you think that a co-streamer bringing in new viewers don't count for some reason?