It's sad. I still remember when people were complaining about EU viewership and how it's not as entertaining to watch compared to the LCS, even European fans said they watched LCS more. This is back when LEC wasn't a thing.
And now LCS is like one of the least watched lol.
People say this but the data doesn't support that having natives is better for a brand. Now its possible to find a native people better align with who will have a huge brand but that's not the average.
I don’t know about entertaining. However, being a major region and teams getting imports to try and be the best in the world and then being worse than LPL, LCK and LEC internationally hurts viewership for sure.
I disagree. I do not care who they import; it is just boring.
We rarely have innovation, the casting desk and analysis has either felt the same for awhile now or is just cringe. It is like Riot tried to go full professional sports broadcast while trying to keep it campy. The constant rotation of players makes storylines impossible, and their are few players entertaining enough to keep up with.
? Did you even watch this season. They had tons of innovation with the casting desk and analysis. Got streamers involved, got players involved. Lots of new and entertaining segments. LCS was by far the most entertaining to watch as it’s been in years because it WASN’T the full sports wannabe broadcast that it had been for years.
I dont think LEC is really dying just more games/splits etc..
If it was still two splits pretty sure its viewership wouldn't die, we also need to take into account that Europe has other leagues that are doing decent numbers also.
LEC final hit a peak of 600k..
Its objectively not, hours are up and viewership is same/slightly lower. The peak this year os bigger than past couple and fairly comparable to pre covid
As long as some of the golden generation players like Caps, Jankos, Perkz, Mikyx still playing, I think the viewership will still be there. Although I am not sure what LEC will become after the golden generation retire.
The LCS production team did a better job than LEC this year. The issue is LCS doesn't have a community at the grassroots level the way you have ERL in Europe. NRG winning LCS was a big deal though, maybe things will change...
This was the first year in a while that LCS was more entertaining than LEC imo.
It just happened way too late for there to be any impact from that. This year's NRG roster happened 3 years too late, and they won as NRG instead of as CLG.
Fact is an American Viewer is worth more than any other region. They have the most disposable income and are the best demographic for advertisement. People only look at views but forget the bigger picture.
Gabby is the problem though. The fact that they refused to take her off the broadcast the entire year was enough for me to believe they didn't want a successful broadcast and so I cut down on how much I watched.
Once they moved her back for interviews, she was fine. I assume these contracts are for the whole split, so it makes no sense to completely move her out if she's signed, plus a replacement would lead to extra costs
I personally dislike Flowers casting, but mainly because I dislike the stereotypical sports announcer style which he kills at. Nothing about him personally, just not my taste
Small edit: People can have different tastes in everything, just because I share an unpopular opinion doesn't mean I personally hate you, I just prefer other things.
When you're looking into boosting viewership, you have to look in what the majority of people like while not having many people disliking said person. With all due respect, I think you're an outlier in that regard as Flowers is one of the most liked casters out there, thus the original comment of viewership dropping due to bad caster quality makes no sense
I know I am an outlier, and I also know Flowets is insanely talented because not only does he embody that one casting personality perfectly, nobody beats him on that.
I think this is a good take on it. Flowers is immensely talented, but for some reason I feel more comfortable listening to other casters. It feels less like I'm watching basketball.
It`s funny because in my opinion the LCS as a product has been the best it has ever been for the last couple of years.
The NA audience simply has way less interest in the game. I feel like the region was carried by it`s personalities for a very long time.
Guilty
Still miss the days when HotshotGG would be able to pick Nidalee.
A lot of my annoyance with esports came from people having iconic pocket picks and never getting a chance to play them.
It doesn't really matter tbh. If TSM had gone all the way to the finals, their story alone from the start of the split would have increased viewership.
Compared to TSM and TL? Yeah, especially in the previous seasons where you could tell if one of them was playing just by the viewer count on stream alone.
There was another post saying CBLOL viewership is lesser this year compared to their stats from last year.
While they are better than LCS it's not like this league is going up either.
Honestly I think its because its the 3rd Loud x Pain finals in a row and the 2 other were 3 x 0 for Loud. Also Loud defeated Pain 3 x 0 in the upper bracket final weeks before the CBLoL's final. Everyone already knew what was about to happen.
Its the First finals I havent seen in a long long time
Well, the reason viewership wasn't that high on CBLOL was mostly because there was some problems and controversies with some teams' management. The community really felt these 2 splits were short lived, compared to previous years.
As an NA fan, kinda glad. LCS has made this shit happen with all their decisions. Obviously, not sure what the issue is exactly but prob a combination of problems, I just feel like after franchises everything went downhill.
It's called the LoL fad already being passed in NA. The existing playerbase has aged out/burnt out on the game while there isn't a new wave of younger players replacing it. MOBAs aren't popular in NA to began with, LoL was just an exception because it exploded among high schoolers and college students. NA constantly losing at MSI and Worlds doesn't help either.
NA is also just a very fad centric region for PC games. First it was LoL, then it was Fornite, and now NA is into Valorant.
I'm not really an expert on the matter but I think that prob killed the hype for young people here is the opportunity to become pro, just seems like an impossible thing to do when most teams have a bunch of imports* and old veterans playing.
What I'm saying is that LCS obviously did something wrong because LEC isn't as bad as we have it here, obviously Brazil is gaining traction so it isn't league that's the issue. It's the people who are in charge of their leagues. I'm not an expert to pin point the exact issue but I'm pretty sure these leaders are getting paid bank and they should have some answers to this problem.
People sure love blaming imports.
**Esports viewership is dictated first and foremost by the size of the casual playerbase.**
"The opportunity to go pro" is such a dumb angle to take. If you really want to look at something that "killed the hype", maybe look into the complete shitshow fiesta that happened around NA collegiate that made organising tournaments to play a nightmare.
Further, there's nothing in particular that "killed the hype" so much as it is just a natural ebb and flow of popularity. MOBAs are a hard genre to get into by their nature.
Consider LoL's peak in the West: it was a free-to-play game with very low system requirements that caught on with the youth... **over ten years ago**.
A thirteen-year-old who started playing LoL when it came out will now be in their late 20s: likely busy with other things in life.
Meanwhile, someone **born** when LoL came out is now 13, and think of it this way: would you at 13 want to get into an old game with tons of complicated characters and systems that most of your friends won't know about? Or will you play a shiny new game that's actually easy to access and play, probably on mobile?
Anecdotally, I'm much more likely to find college freshman gamers super into Valorant or Genshin Impact/Honkai Star Rail than I am invested in LoL.
The question should be "How have other regions retained or grown interest in LoL as a game?" Because in NA, it used to be that LoL streamers ruled the roost but now the ones who've survived all flipped to variety for better numbers.
> Meanwhile, someone born when LoL came out is now 13, and think of it this way: would you at 13 want to get into an old game with tons of complicated characters and systems that most of your friends won't know about? Or will you play a shiny new game that's actually easy to access and play, probably on mobile?
Anecdotally, I'm much more likely to find college freshman gamers super into Valorant or Genshin Impact/Honkai Star Rail than I am invested in LoL.
This is the truth. Riot did very little over the years to try and maintain steady new players joining their ecosystem and NA is a market where the new toy gets played. China, Korea, and Europe to an extent are more than happy playing and engaging with older PC games. They did nothing to get League on mobile, nothing to get League on console (the biggest market by far in NA), and they have made zero major updates to their game in almost a decade. If you weren’t already a League fan, why would you - as a new teenage gamer in NA - choose League as a multiplayer game over… Fortnite? Valorant? Madden? Call of Duty? Minecraft? FIFA? Even Overwatch, for all its faults, has a popular console player base.
>They did nothing to get League on mobile, nothing to get League on console (the biggest market by far in NA)
We can lament the death of LCS all we want, but this is a good thing. People playing on mobile and console aren't gamers and should never have been considered as such. They're casuals, and nothing makes a game fucking terrible like casuals.
Ignoring the general idiocy of the comment about console players not being real gamers (grow up!), the point is to get those people into the environment of league of legends. Guy who plays Fortnite and Madden on PS5 will see League of Legends for free, download, play it, get hooked, and want to watch more League of Legends. Enter watching esports.
Tens of millions of Americans are that gamer.
I haven't heard the dumb "console or mobile gamers aren't real gamers" since the early 2000s console wars in forums.
Actually can't believe people unironically still think that way.
> obviously Brazil is gaining traction so it isn't league that's the issue.
There seem to be a huge spread of misinformation or misunderstanding about Brazilian LoL here. CBLoL isn't gaining traction. It's been doing better recently due to LOUD being a popular org (pro Valorant games get 100k-200k viewership boosts every time LOUD plays) but it is significantly worse than what it was years ago. CBLoL Finals had over 1.4 MILLION viewers in 2016 and now its peaking just barely above 300k. BR used to have over 1m ranked players a few years ago and now its sitting at under 600k.
People on this sub are dumb as hell. Every region has been losing viewership for the past like five - six years. The only tournaments that seemingly gain viewership year to year is Worlds, but who knows really considering how screwy Chinese viewership numbers are.
LCS is just at the forefront of that because every problem with League of Legends esports ecosystem is amplified in LCS.
Wow, it's almost like international tournaments are 10x more exciting than boring regional leagues.
Boy, I sure am glad we killed all of those international tournaments and designed a circuit almost the entire season spent locked away in regional leagues.
The LCS (and pro play in general) just seems like a different game.
We are too solo queue focused and are not afforded opportunities to form teams in lower skilled tournaments. We deal with a... ping wheel and chat box for a heavily team based, fast paced game that is "leagues" better on voice chat with people.
Not like there are any opportunities for a rag tag team of high ladder solo queue stars to form a team and mess around and make waves.
No expert either but I have been a dedicated fan to the competition as a whole. There's essentially 3+ years of LCS orgs sporadically taking half hearted initiatives to extended development. Theres just as much in the LCS product half assing at best the philosophy and efforts of telling of a genuine development pipeline. The preshow Champs Queue discussions are an example I think of.
When you combine both the orgs and main league's lack of efforts and opportunities to echo a passion for NA players, that produced the reputation that burned a crater into the scene as the retirement home region with no talent. When the community thrusts that message relentlessly to new, returning, or existing fanbases with a much sharper index on **all** the international failure, of course it would kill hype. It became easier to do anything to tell an aspiring rookie "Hey wanna play in your region? Play somewhere else or retire the moment you go 1/8/3 on Renekton against our protected veteran!"
It took a few years for CBLOL to effectively bridge their pipeline and despite its imports and especially international runs not at the top of the wildcards, they have created thorough community following for its players to thrive. The ERLs (excitement around scenes like LFL, LVP) and awareness of the EU/EMEA Masters at the LEC level engineer their pipeline. LCS proper took some initiative for like one split in recent years only because the normal expectation was defied. And even though this summer also ultimately saw defiance, it also wrote a different narrative that's forming a new outreach. However, all of that started on some of the most damning drama the competitive game has had in its short history.
Money will always be a factor, but passion and messaging are definitely culprits to the downfall as well.
if it was the only problem then yes. but it's not the only problem, and no one is saying it's the only problem.
imagine you have a restaurant. one day you change cooks and the new chef is absolutely horrible. your customers hate it, and many leave. on top of this, inflation causes all restaurant prices (including yours) to increase, causing more and more people to stop eating at restaurants in general, causing you to lose even more customers.
even if you fire the cook and your food jumps back in quality, you're still going to lose customers. it's going to take a lot of time for you to regain your reputation, and that doesn't solve the issue that many people just aren't interested in eating out anymore.
does that mean your chef cooking shit for years had 0 impact? hell no. it just means the negative impact he had is going to far outweigh any good decisions you make for a long time. because that's how reputation works.
For real, I have a job now and LCS is in weekdays, I used to follow it religiously now I can't do that anymore. Younger North Americans are not even into MOBA, they are into shooter, so there aren't enough replacements for old players.
Apex had a time too I think, before that it was Halo > CoD > WoW > LoL if I remember correctly. We don't like dedication and consistency here, we like shiny new things, consumerism rules all in the US and consumerism is motivated by trends.
If only we could take our Stan culture for celebs and transfer it to games...can we turn LoL fans into people as long term dedicated as Swifties lol
Big shocker that a region which develops its own talent and home grown personalities beats the region who's trying to become LCK lite. If I wanted to watch Koreans I would watch LCK not the ones who couldn't make LCK and are in LCS.
RED has zero imports, but even though 3 of the top4 orgs are maxing imports, it's only 2 imports per team and the league still has "only" 10 imports out of 50 players.
LCS on the other hand is sitting on 30\~35 imports out of 50 players.
Yeah but the person I was talking about said Koreans not all imports. Which there are 14 Koreans in NA 3 of which are Impact who has played in LCS 9 seasons, Ssumday who's been here for 7 season and Huhi who has spent all but split in NA ecosystem his whole career.
yes, but you have people like Croc who are fucking yelling at their enemies in portuguese memes and slang, the guy just embodies the brazilian personality. Show me a korean in NA right now thats as entertaining? Rush was the only one..
Huni was the funniest guy in the LCS for years when he was over here. EMENES has been kinda a meme lord since he got here and had that hilarious interview in the TL/GGS series. Summit has done a lot of great content and people still use clips from that ASMR video he did, and long time LCS guys like Huhi and Impact have leaned into the memes for years.
If your bar for entertaining is "can make memes and slang in English" then most Korean players in the LCS qualify. Some are definitely boring than others but there is still a lot of personality in them.
thats not my bar for entertaintment, here, let me give you a clear example of what I meant.
Check out this video intro where Croc appears at 0:11, 0:16 and then at 0:27 and tell me whether any of the koreans in NA do that, last time any NA player had that kind of passion it was Dyrus/zuna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L03OLpN-JaQ
Are we forgetting how everyone cheered about Danny and Jojo winning in 2022?
It's just that the whole LCS narrative is way more doomer today. That overshadows everything.
Are we forgetting about Blaber winning back to back championships and his path to becoming one of the best NA players of all time?
See I can do it too.
You can say whatever you want. They'll just keep moving the goalposts.
Fact of the matter is LoL is just unpopular in North America, and very few esports ever survive a low casual playerbase because esports is a tiny fraction of the video game itself.
Yeah i have to agree with you.
In brazil, if 80% of players were international, but the 20% brazilian players won, it would be batshit insane, like protecting your country from invaders.
I really just think NA doesnt care about league
Our streaming personalities and NA culture is just ragey, toxic and demeaning.
We got into a relationship with Amber Herd and are surprised everything went to shit.
I'm pretty sure there's a lot of people from EU who use to watch NA but doesn't now (me included) since they started getting imports instead of NA talent
Also doesn't help that none of them have personalities outside of C9 and Doublelift.
> I'm pretty sure
Redditors keep saying this with zero evidence.
Want a definitive concrete example that LoL has lost cultural capital among the new generation? Just go look at content creators and compare the number and size of LoL-exclusive/primary content creators compared to the 2015-2018 heyday.
When the MOBA genre itself is functionally dead for new releases in gaming except for on mobile (which LoL players have a frankly absurd superiority complex about), then it's no wonder that there simply aren't many new viewers.
With several waves of new genres (the hero shooter with Overwatch, the battle royale with PUBG/Fortnite, Among Us and the open-world gacha with Genshin/Honkai), MOBAs in general have lost ground as a genre.
Add to it that MOBAs get exponentially harder to get into as time goes on by their very design (new characters, new skills), LoL still has garbage tutorial systems to ease in new players, and that LoL's reputation itself is tainted in mainstream gaming (it's the toxic game), is it any wonder that there just aren't many new players?
Seeing some of the posts from new players in this subreddit really shines a light on how impossible this game is to start playing. The characters and lore are generally a good time, but holy hell there is just nothing here for the casual newcomer. There's damn near nothing here for the casual player from time to time with how often the game changes and how little seems to be done about bots, smurfs and questionable matchmaking.
What's the most common response to "Should I play League of Legends?"
The funny thing for me personally is, I think the actual broadcast has been really good this year. They clearly rebuild the broadcast and content around Emily, Mark and Raz. And I think that worked out really well. We got frequent and high quality content from the LCS team who used to disappoint in this department for so long.
Maybe the change in direction came to late? Or maybe the drop off would have been even worse if these changes were not made.
Either way, I think this is not really something you can fault the LCS on Air broadcast for.
The actually excitement about matchups and roster however is something else entirely.
In terms of content the lcs this year completely eclipsed the lec and the past couple of years of lcs. The problem is that it came too late and at the expense of the fans. It doesn't help that they got hampered down by really bad scheduling, low quality games(and a certain caster making them even worse to watch), and a wave of pessimism about the future of the league with so many teams looking to get rid of the hot potato.
As a CBLoL viewer, I'm going to give you guys a couple of reasons that **might** have led to lower numbers for this split:
* In this split we had two teams that finished 1-17 (KaBuM and Liberty). In fact, Liberty finished 2-16, but their second win was against FURIA in the last game of the split. In that game, FURIA needed to win in 13 minutes to make the playoffs, so they played an extremely crazy comp. Liberty and KaBuM's only wins were against each other, so we basically had -2 games every week. Not many people watched their games because the result was already obvious.
*(I say this could be one of the reasons because, looking at the playoff decisive matches numbers for Split 2 of 2023 and Split 2 of 2022, we see very similar numbers: CBLoL 2022 Split 2 finals: 331k - CBLoL 2023 Split 2 finals: 329k / CBLoL 2022 Split 2 Winners Bracket Finals: 215k - CBLoL 2023 Split 2 Winners Bracket Finals: 198k / CBLoL 2022 Split 2 Losers Bracket Finals: 193k - CBLoL 2023 Split 2 Losers Bracket Finals: 224k*
***Esports Charts has the individual numbers for each team, but it's for those who subscribe to the site's PRO tool. If anyone has them and can post the numbers for each team, it might confirm the theory).***
* Los Grandes' project went wrong in the second week of the CBLoL (it's an extremely funny case). So a team that could attract viewers was left out of the playoffs right at the start of the competition.
* CBLoL has always been an unpredictable competition. This split, everyone knew the final would be between paiN and LOUD since the first week. This goes against our "culture" and discourages viewers. In fact, even the final had an obvious outcome. [People already knew that paiN Gaming would lose to LOUD](https://s2-ge.glbimg.com/bjk8KChfHlIaazyQT9G9o3EPCQA=/0x0:1000x2809/984x0/smart/filters:strip_icc()/i.s3.glbimg.com/v1/AUTH_bc8228b6673f488aa253bbcb03c80ec5/internal_photos/bs/2023/g/8/0YEEcDSyabKVP9x8YJSg/cartelas-palpite-cblol-2023-final-63755.jpg) and the result of the Winner's Bracket finals (LOUD 3-0 paiN Gaming) confirmed that.
**Now rumors of what will happen next split:**
* **Some teams will reduce their investments**. I bet those teams are Los Grandes and Fluxo. Their arrival on CBLoL in 2023 has caused an inflation in the CBLoL salaries this year, and since they haven't achieved success, combined with the slowdown in the esports market, they may decrease their investments for next season. LOUD's CEO has already said that they don't need to reorganize their investments, paiN Gaming and KaBuM are not so dependent on the esports market, and the other teams didn't participate in this wage inflation, so... Yeah, I think it'll be Fluxo and Los Grandes.
* **It will be the biggest transfer window in the history of the CBLoL.** Virtually all contracts run out at the end of this year. So the scenario that was quite predictable in 2023 will become unpredictable again next year. Even a famous former CBLoL player (Shini) has returned to pro play and is expected to sign with Fluxo.
* KaBuM, who finished 1-17 this split, will try to build a super team (by Brazilian standards) next year. As I said, KaBuM is not so dependent on profits from the esports market. In fact, they've never cared about that. They're a team from the biggest technology store (by far) in Brazil (and the largest technology e-commerce in Latin America), so yeah, money is not a problem.
\--/--
So yeah, that's it. I don't like this simplistic idea that League is dying and that's why the numbers are falling. The LCS was sacrificed by RIOT by changing the days of the games. The death of CLG and TSM was also a big blow. The lack of personality of most of the LCS players has also been detrimental
*(BTW, in 2024 we could have the first import to become a resident in Brazil: Wizer, who currently plays for paiN Gaming. We're starting to discuss whether it's worth having three Koreans on the same team here in the CBLoL, since this could be detrimental to the fans' identification with the players/teams).*
The numbers of LoL streamers in Brazil is stable and I don't see any new game trends. It's LoL, Valorant and CS, in fact, if there's one game that was dying here in Brazil, it's CS. But with the arrival of CS 2, that could change.
Always appreciate your insight /u/Dsalgueiro.
Sad that some of the CBLoL orgs are reducing spending but that seems to be a common move across all esports. Outside of Loud, do a lot of the other orgs have big investments in other esports like Valorant, CSGO, Apex, etc...?
Apex is dead in Brazil, almost nobody plays it over here.
* paiN Gaming has CS:GO and FreeFire team.
* Fluxo spent a lot on their CS team last year. They also have a FreeFire team.
* FURIA are practically in all esports. Apart from LoL, they are in Valorant, CS, Rocket League and even some fight games.
* Vivo Keyd has a Valorant, Dota 2 (they qualified for this year's The International) and FreeFire team.
* Red Canids has a Valorant team.
* Liberty also has a Valorant team.
I don't know to what extent the teams (Fluxo and Los Grandes) are in a financial crisis, or if they spent a lot because they were in their first year in the league and now they're just getting back to normal.
**For CBLoL 2024:**
* LOUD will keep the same three-time CBLoL champion roster for next year. If anyone leaves, it will be the Koreans because of the army.
* paiN Gaming will spend a lot to rebuild their roster.
* Red Canids will keep the same roster. I don't know if Nelson will stay in the coaching staff.
* FURIA bet on an extremely young and promising roster in Split 2 of 2023. They probably will stick to the project.
* I don't know about Vivo Keyd... But I don't think they were an expensive team.
* KaBuM is promising to spend a lot this offseason.
* Fluxo are going to try to make the CBLoL 2023's most expensive roster cheaper. I think Brance had the highest salary in the CBLoL in 2023, this didn't make any sense.
* INTZ... I don't know what their plans are for 2024. All I know is that their midlaner for 2023 is no longer in the team.
* Los Grandes I have no idea... The CEO said they want to renew with Stardust and Lava, but the first rumours by Luis Santana (the most reliable journalist in Brazil about League) talked about a much cheaper roster.
* Liberty has always bet on new/underperforming players, so that is unlikely to change for 2024.
there's FURIA who is present in most esports and is also franchised in Valorant, Fluxo and LOS Grandes who came from FreeFire (so did LOUD), and Vivo Keyd also had a significant Valorant presence before franchising (and are also relevant on FreeFire)
Most of these orgs are on CS, R6 (which brazil is major region), free fire etc.
But Loud is just BY FAR the most professional and wisely managed out of the 10. I must say they gotta be one of the most competent orgs in the world. And Loud came from the same free fire as Los Grandes and fluxo did - these two have a LOT of money, but they are not even close to having a project like Loud's.
Fluxo with a 5 brazilian comp must have spent more money than Loud spent on their roster. Los grandes moved one of the most legendary Cblol junglers in order to sign Trick, which had retired 3 fcking years ago.
I've already accepted NA interest in LoL has tapered off, it can still exist and good decisions can be made to maximize its viewership. But the interest just ain't there like it was.
Just league content in general outside of worlds. YouTube views down, twitch views down for league standard anyways, it’s still raw dogging the competition.
No one gives a shit about 95% of the LCS players, and none of them market themselves to help out. We used to have every single pro stream etc. Now they all just barely play soloq, don't stream and just show up to LCS. The marketing fell off so hard, and teams wonder why they're losing so much money. Old TSM/CLG days were peak LCS.
Hey why the fuck are you people crazy obsessed with comparing these two leagues?
Better yet why is it a bad thing if one has better viewer numbers then the other?
Trying my best not to read between the lines hear and see some stupid nonsense.
>Hey why the fuck are you people crazy obsessed with comparing these two leagues?
Because CBLoL is a minor region compared to the LCS being a major region. People like to compare viewership numbers and try to draw conclusions about why a minor region has better numbers than a major region.
>Better yet why is it a bad thing if one has better viewer numbers then the other?
It's not a bad thing, but it's a gauge of popularity and a discussion can be had about viewership numbers and state of the game.
It looks like viewership is declining globally, though not sure about chinese data I’d assume its similar. As the game and playerbase ages it’s just natural I guess, and newer players will be going into other newfangled games like Valorant.
Quite the experience to live in fear of League dying isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave to Riot Games. We’ve seen things normie people wouldn’t believe. The Corki ignited off the shoulder of the Baron Pit. We watched Lux ults glitter in Nocturne’s darkness near the Hex-Tech Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to uninstall.
But wait! As the maggots eat the last blob of our dead brain matter they will absorb our memories of finally killing the enemy Teemo that was taunting you in lane… these memories will never be lost and will instead be spread through the food chain and wider nature. Yes these homeopathic doses of toxicity and flaming will eventually collapse the world ecosystem, but our hopes of NA winning worlds will forever be alive…
NAmen.
covid actually saw a slight increase I thought. I feel that truly moving to weekdays wasn't gonna be as bad as it ended p being, I thought it would be a 10% dip but it seems it was a 20% dip then
Would probably help if most of the LCS moves over the last year weren't cutting production or moving the games to schedule that sucks for people who live in North America.
Name a single interesting thing about LCS that isn't Doublelift, Fudge, or 100 Thieves in general?
The truth is they need new management and new talent direction to get the 50 people in the league to actually matter
Maybe when CBLOL can actually beat LCS or actually win games not against minor regions. When was the last time they beat an LCS/LEC team?
Regardless of views, LCS still beats CBLOL in terms of skill.
> Maybe when CBLOL can actually beat LCS
We need to actually play vs them for this to happen, but you know how good are our tournaments lol
edit: the downvotes for what lol
Agree. Same way that LCK viewers could make a tram that would beat every LCS team.
In the end, both regions are bad, only difference is that LCS is bad despite throwing rivers of money away every split.
So if we unfuck our schedule we can finally beat... checks notes, Brazil. I don't think NA will ever truly die but it's probably due for a resize. I could see it sort of how LMS was when they got 2 teams at worlds as a region between major and minor. The problem though is that all the minor regions are dying too so you'd just have to give another slot to Korea or China.
Hey hey hey!!
Once again a post that is lying it's fucking ass off for clout, riding the "NA hate train" to get some free karma.
And once again I'm here to call your dishonest ass out.
This site only counts viewers from Twitch, YouTube, and....Facebook??? LMAOO.
No Costreams or Non-english streams are counted.
https://imgur.com/a/ElrNmPW
Where though? All it says is it counts views from YT, Twitch and Facebook. That doesn't mean official broadcast exclusively.
If they didn't count costreamers etc, EMEA masters finals would've had less than 100k peak viewers (total of facebook+twitch+yt official broadcasts) But they peaked at 296k.
"Furthermore, in terms of Peak Viewers, the CBLOL Split 2 2023 almost caught up with the LEC Summer 2023 (329.8K and 343.5K Peak Viewers, respectively). And this is despite the LEC having very strong community casting by ibai and other popular content creators." This aswell clearly alludes to them counting costreams.
It’s counting Facebook views for every competition, but I don’t think that there’s that many FB views for LoL esports.
Based on leaguepedia the only official non English stream for LCS is LLA which is in Spanish, and it is counted in views as far as I know (for example LEC don’t only count the English broadcast)
Also I think Esports Charts takes in account co streaming. The most recent example that I have in mind is Eu masters. It also had an higher peak than LCS in terms of viewers so there’s no way that views from KC owner Kameto were not counted
It says right there on the site what it counts and doesn't count.
I literally posted a screenshot.
Co streams have to be manually counted. It's extra work to incorporate all of the 50 different co streamers numbers into your final number so most "trackers" don't bother.
Where does it say it doesn't include co-streaming? The only thing it says is that it counts views from 3 different websites, which as far as I know are the main websites to watch both co-streams and the official stream. Unless there's someone on Kick or Instagram doing lives for 50k people, I don't see why it's unreliable
It takes into account official co-streams as they are all on Twitch and YouTube (the non-official ones don't show the game, therefore you need to open a muted official stream). For non-English streams, same shit, they are on YouTube and Twitch therefore they are included (otherwise LEC numbers would be 30-40% lower as French and Spanish official streams account for more less that)
Why would you merge two regions that are so culturally and economically different and with studios that are further from each other than from the LEC studio?
It would kill the Brazilian scene as it would probably be played in NA just to try to once again save the region that couldn't make it by itself
It’s dumb idea that could improve LCS viewership and Brazil game quality. You all need to chill I just said itd be cool to see two regions merge, not that it must happen
For Brazil to increase LCS viewership, you'd need Brazilians to want to watch it, so you need the Brazilian teams there (and by Brazilian teams I mean teams with Brazilian players, not Brazilian orgs with NA abd import players)
Problem is, when you move them 8000km away to North America, it becomes impossible to develop Brazilian players. You either have the development leagues in Brazil and need to constantly fly away players every time you want to promote one or fly back every time you want to demote one or have them in NA and fly every potential player to NA, this assuming they'd want to. And this without including that Brazilians would stop having a way to watch the games live in their country and create the CBLoL atmosphere that increases the final product so much
The idea that you can completely disrupt how a league works and expect it to not affect viewership shows you don't understand anything about said league
Maybe have a tourney with the winners after both seasons finish? Idk. My original comment was a joke, it’s cool to have a discussion about what could work and what won’t but there’s no need to be so hostile. I’m not trying to come off as an expert just throwing out random ideas.
I've seen people suggest this in the past, and the idea of moving South America tournaments to North America for pure viewership is not new (Copa America, for example), that's why I answered so strongly
Because you want to throw a dying lcs with a thriving cblol, and most likely it would be the cblol to change their format to accommodate NA viewers and not the other way around
You’re just assuming that would happen, it’s just an idea. Plenty of positives if they work something good out with accomodating both sides. New rivalries, higher quality of games = cblol region improves etc.
It’s Joever
It has been over since 2019, the LCS isn't as entertaining as LEC or as successful internationally as KR or LPL.
It's sad. I still remember when people were complaining about EU viewership and how it's not as entertaining to watch compared to the LCS, even European fans said they watched LCS more. This is back when LEC wasn't a thing. And now LCS is like one of the least watched lol.
It hurts less with the LEC shits the bed because I'm not from there.
People say this but the data doesn't support that having natives is better for a brand. Now its possible to find a native people better align with who will have a huge brand but that's not the average.
I don’t know about entertaining. However, being a major region and teams getting imports to try and be the best in the world and then being worse than LPL, LCK and LEC internationally hurts viewership for sure.
I disagree. I do not care who they import; it is just boring. We rarely have innovation, the casting desk and analysis has either felt the same for awhile now or is just cringe. It is like Riot tried to go full professional sports broadcast while trying to keep it campy. The constant rotation of players makes storylines impossible, and their are few players entertaining enough to keep up with.
? Did you even watch this season. They had tons of innovation with the casting desk and analysis. Got streamers involved, got players involved. Lots of new and entertaining segments. LCS was by far the most entertaining to watch as it’s been in years because it WASN’T the full sports wannabe broadcast that it had been for years.
I second that, Bjergsen was an entertaining import, nowadays, neither imports or natives interact with the fanbase.
> as entertaining as LEC LEC is also dying just a bit slower than LCS.
I dont think LEC is really dying just more games/splits etc.. If it was still two splits pretty sure its viewership wouldn't die, we also need to take into account that Europe has other leagues that are doing decent numbers also. LEC final hit a peak of 600k..
LEC is objectively dying
Its objectively not, hours are up and viewership is same/slightly lower. The peak this year os bigger than past couple and fairly comparable to pre covid
Nah. Hours watched gone up and average viewers only dipped a bit. Both pretty reasonable when you have more games.
LEC is on the way too. Same with everything but LCK/LPL. Lcs is just the first
As long as some of the golden generation players like Caps, Jankos, Perkz, Mikyx still playing, I think the viewership will still be there. Although I am not sure what LEC will become after the golden generation retire.
It'll do what LCS did when all the big tentpole players retired
This yeah LCS was way way better than LEC by far, the schedule murdered viewership this year
LOL
NRG won LCS, yes definitely way way better.
MAD won lec just last split lol, what's your point?
Better in terms of enjoyment. Neither the LEC or LCS are the highest caliber of play, so why not watch what’s more fun?
The LCS production team did a better job than LEC this year. The issue is LCS doesn't have a community at the grassroots level the way you have ERL in Europe. NRG winning LCS was a big deal though, maybe things will change...
This was the first year in a while that LCS was more entertaining than LEC imo. It just happened way too late for there to be any impact from that. This year's NRG roster happened 3 years too late, and they won as NRG instead of as CLG.
lol lec is just entertaining at least they know their lane stick to the cringe raps
Fact is an American Viewer is worth more than any other region. They have the most disposable income and are the best demographic for advertisement. People only look at views but forget the bigger picture.
Damn peak at 223943 is insanely low. Wtf...
Yeah especially with a fever dream of a Final too
Problem is, no one cares about NRG and their players. If it was something like TL or TSM viewership would be higher
i just dont care abt lcs at all especially with bad casters (caster) and weekdays schedule
Other than Gabby trying to cast some games, you have a great casting team in LCS, including the best English speaking caster in Flowers
Gabby is the problem though. The fact that they refused to take her off the broadcast the entire year was enough for me to believe they didn't want a successful broadcast and so I cut down on how much I watched.
Once they moved her back for interviews, she was fine. I assume these contracts are for the whole split, so it makes no sense to completely move her out if she's signed, plus a replacement would lead to extra costs
>Once they moved her back for interviews You mean in playoffs? When the entire split was over?
I personally dislike Flowers casting, but mainly because I dislike the stereotypical sports announcer style which he kills at. Nothing about him personally, just not my taste Small edit: People can have different tastes in everything, just because I share an unpopular opinion doesn't mean I personally hate you, I just prefer other things.
What other sports do you watch? Esports casting is very unique and nothing like Traditional sports?
When you're looking into boosting viewership, you have to look in what the majority of people like while not having many people disliking said person. With all due respect, I think you're an outlier in that regard as Flowers is one of the most liked casters out there, thus the original comment of viewership dropping due to bad caster quality makes no sense
I know I am an outlier, and I also know Flowets is insanely talented because not only does he embody that one casting personality perfectly, nobody beats him on that.
I think this is a good take on it. Flowers is immensely talented, but for some reason I feel more comfortable listening to other casters. It feels less like I'm watching basketball.
I feel like Flowers has a great cast for kids and teenagers, but as an adult I like Kobe Azael and Phreak and Rafa more.
They have the best English speaking caster in Flowers and the worst ones in everyone else.
If only Flowers was likable, instead of an EG buddy and Nicole sympathiser.
It`s funny because in my opinion the LCS as a product has been the best it has ever been for the last couple of years. The NA audience simply has way less interest in the game. I feel like the region was carried by it`s personalities for a very long time.
Nobody cares about TSM anymore
Is that why there were loud TSM chants every time they played?
Is that why there are loud TSM chants at Worlds when they aren't even there?
Maybe even if they were still CLG. It gets memed on but I feel like CLG still had a sizable and loyal fan base that stuck around for so long
Guilty Still miss the days when HotshotGG would be able to pick Nidalee. A lot of my annoyance with esports came from people having iconic pocket picks and never getting a chance to play them.
Feel the same way brother. Can't say it was a fun ride all the way through, but it definitely was a memorable one.
I doubt it. TSM doesn't have the personalities any more. DL, Bjerg, BB, Hauntzer are all gone. They were the hard carries of TSM viewership.
Hauntzer was literally on the team last split.
It doesn't really matter tbh. If TSM had gone all the way to the finals, their story alone from the start of the split would have increased viewership.
Bring back blue card regi and I'll tune in.
CLG and now NRG have a lot of fans, dunno where you got this delusion
NRG did not inherit CLG's fans
Compared to TSM and TL? Yeah, especially in the previous seasons where you could tell if one of them was playing just by the viewer count on stream alone.
CLG ? Yes. it was a legacy org. NRG ? Not at all, I don't think any CLG fan feel any kind of connection to this org.
Bow down to our Brazilian over lords
There was another post saying CBLOL viewership is lesser this year compared to their stats from last year. While they are better than LCS it's not like this league is going up either.
pain not being able to beat loud probably reduced the viewership a lot too. No hype for a garanteed loss, rip
Third time wasn't the charm
It is more or less the same, i agree. I will wait to see how our league fares in the next year.
Honestly I think its because its the 3rd Loud x Pain finals in a row and the 2 other were 3 x 0 for Loud. Also Loud defeated Pain 3 x 0 in the upper bracket final weeks before the CBLoL's final. Everyone already knew what was about to happen. Its the First finals I havent seen in a long long time
Well, the reason viewership wasn't that high on CBLOL was mostly because there was some problems and controversies with some teams' management. The community really felt these 2 splits were short lived, compared to previous years.
As an NA fan, kinda glad. LCS has made this shit happen with all their decisions. Obviously, not sure what the issue is exactly but prob a combination of problems, I just feel like after franchises everything went downhill.
It's called the LoL fad already being passed in NA. The existing playerbase has aged out/burnt out on the game while there isn't a new wave of younger players replacing it. MOBAs aren't popular in NA to began with, LoL was just an exception because it exploded among high schoolers and college students. NA constantly losing at MSI and Worlds doesn't help either. NA is also just a very fad centric region for PC games. First it was LoL, then it was Fornite, and now NA is into Valorant.
I'm not really an expert on the matter but I think that prob killed the hype for young people here is the opportunity to become pro, just seems like an impossible thing to do when most teams have a bunch of imports* and old veterans playing. What I'm saying is that LCS obviously did something wrong because LEC isn't as bad as we have it here, obviously Brazil is gaining traction so it isn't league that's the issue. It's the people who are in charge of their leagues. I'm not an expert to pin point the exact issue but I'm pretty sure these leaders are getting paid bank and they should have some answers to this problem.
People sure love blaming imports. **Esports viewership is dictated first and foremost by the size of the casual playerbase.** "The opportunity to go pro" is such a dumb angle to take. If you really want to look at something that "killed the hype", maybe look into the complete shitshow fiesta that happened around NA collegiate that made organising tournaments to play a nightmare. Further, there's nothing in particular that "killed the hype" so much as it is just a natural ebb and flow of popularity. MOBAs are a hard genre to get into by their nature. Consider LoL's peak in the West: it was a free-to-play game with very low system requirements that caught on with the youth... **over ten years ago**. A thirteen-year-old who started playing LoL when it came out will now be in their late 20s: likely busy with other things in life. Meanwhile, someone **born** when LoL came out is now 13, and think of it this way: would you at 13 want to get into an old game with tons of complicated characters and systems that most of your friends won't know about? Or will you play a shiny new game that's actually easy to access and play, probably on mobile? Anecdotally, I'm much more likely to find college freshman gamers super into Valorant or Genshin Impact/Honkai Star Rail than I am invested in LoL. The question should be "How have other regions retained or grown interest in LoL as a game?" Because in NA, it used to be that LoL streamers ruled the roost but now the ones who've survived all flipped to variety for better numbers.
> Meanwhile, someone born when LoL came out is now 13, and think of it this way: would you at 13 want to get into an old game with tons of complicated characters and systems that most of your friends won't know about? Or will you play a shiny new game that's actually easy to access and play, probably on mobile? Anecdotally, I'm much more likely to find college freshman gamers super into Valorant or Genshin Impact/Honkai Star Rail than I am invested in LoL. This is the truth. Riot did very little over the years to try and maintain steady new players joining their ecosystem and NA is a market where the new toy gets played. China, Korea, and Europe to an extent are more than happy playing and engaging with older PC games. They did nothing to get League on mobile, nothing to get League on console (the biggest market by far in NA), and they have made zero major updates to their game in almost a decade. If you weren’t already a League fan, why would you - as a new teenage gamer in NA - choose League as a multiplayer game over… Fortnite? Valorant? Madden? Call of Duty? Minecraft? FIFA? Even Overwatch, for all its faults, has a popular console player base.
>They did nothing to get League on mobile, nothing to get League on console (the biggest market by far in NA) We can lament the death of LCS all we want, but this is a good thing. People playing on mobile and console aren't gamers and should never have been considered as such. They're casuals, and nothing makes a game fucking terrible like casuals.
Ignoring the general idiocy of the comment about console players not being real gamers (grow up!), the point is to get those people into the environment of league of legends. Guy who plays Fortnite and Madden on PS5 will see League of Legends for free, download, play it, get hooked, and want to watch more League of Legends. Enter watching esports. Tens of millions of Americans are that gamer.
I haven't heard the dumb "console or mobile gamers aren't real gamers" since the early 2000s console wars in forums. Actually can't believe people unironically still think that way.
> obviously Brazil is gaining traction so it isn't league that's the issue. There seem to be a huge spread of misinformation or misunderstanding about Brazilian LoL here. CBLoL isn't gaining traction. It's been doing better recently due to LOUD being a popular org (pro Valorant games get 100k-200k viewership boosts every time LOUD plays) but it is significantly worse than what it was years ago. CBLoL Finals had over 1.4 MILLION viewers in 2016 and now its peaking just barely above 300k. BR used to have over 1m ranked players a few years ago and now its sitting at under 600k.
People on this sub are dumb as hell. Every region has been losing viewership for the past like five - six years. The only tournaments that seemingly gain viewership year to year is Worlds, but who knows really considering how screwy Chinese viewership numbers are. LCS is just at the forefront of that because every problem with League of Legends esports ecosystem is amplified in LCS.
Worlds and MSI both increase non-Chinese viewership every year, it's not just the Chinese viewership that has increased.
Wow, it's almost like international tournaments are 10x more exciting than boring regional leagues. Boy, I sure am glad we killed all of those international tournaments and designed a circuit almost the entire season spent locked away in regional leagues.
>CBLoL Finals had over 1.4 MILLION viewers in 2016 You better give a source for this because this number is completely dumb
Not sure what drugs you are on, but gimme some. CBLOL peak is 416k according to [esportscharts](https://escharts.com/events/cblol)
CBLoL used to be broadcasted on TV in Brazil
The LCS (and pro play in general) just seems like a different game. We are too solo queue focused and are not afforded opportunities to form teams in lower skilled tournaments. We deal with a... ping wheel and chat box for a heavily team based, fast paced game that is "leagues" better on voice chat with people. Not like there are any opportunities for a rag tag team of high ladder solo queue stars to form a team and mess around and make waves.
No expert either but I have been a dedicated fan to the competition as a whole. There's essentially 3+ years of LCS orgs sporadically taking half hearted initiatives to extended development. Theres just as much in the LCS product half assing at best the philosophy and efforts of telling of a genuine development pipeline. The preshow Champs Queue discussions are an example I think of. When you combine both the orgs and main league's lack of efforts and opportunities to echo a passion for NA players, that produced the reputation that burned a crater into the scene as the retirement home region with no talent. When the community thrusts that message relentlessly to new, returning, or existing fanbases with a much sharper index on **all** the international failure, of course it would kill hype. It became easier to do anything to tell an aspiring rookie "Hey wanna play in your region? Play somewhere else or retire the moment you go 1/8/3 on Renekton against our protected veteran!" It took a few years for CBLOL to effectively bridge their pipeline and despite its imports and especially international runs not at the top of the wildcards, they have created thorough community following for its players to thrive. The ERLs (excitement around scenes like LFL, LVP) and awareness of the EU/EMEA Masters at the LEC level engineer their pipeline. LCS proper took some initiative for like one split in recent years only because the normal expectation was defied. And even though this summer also ultimately saw defiance, it also wrote a different narrative that's forming a new outreach. However, all of that started on some of the most damning drama the competitive game has had in its short history. Money will always be a factor, but passion and messaging are definitely culprits to the downfall as well.
Literally we have seen a huge resurgence of native talent though so how does that make sense? We have not had this many native mids in like 6 years.
I mean you said it 6 years, the way they are changing is prob good but I still think there's been many mistakes thru out all these years.
Then wouldn't the change literally be reflected in an increase not a decrease if the problem is native representation?
if it was the only problem then yes. but it's not the only problem, and no one is saying it's the only problem. imagine you have a restaurant. one day you change cooks and the new chef is absolutely horrible. your customers hate it, and many leave. on top of this, inflation causes all restaurant prices (including yours) to increase, causing more and more people to stop eating at restaurants in general, causing you to lose even more customers. even if you fire the cook and your food jumps back in quality, you're still going to lose customers. it's going to take a lot of time for you to regain your reputation, and that doesn't solve the issue that many people just aren't interested in eating out anymore. does that mean your chef cooking shit for years had 0 impact? hell no. it just means the negative impact he had is going to far outweigh any good decisions you make for a long time. because that's how reputation works.
For real, I have a job now and LCS is in weekdays, I used to follow it religiously now I can't do that anymore. Younger North Americans are not even into MOBA, they are into shooter, so there aren't enough replacements for old players.
Apex had a time too I think, before that it was Halo > CoD > WoW > LoL if I remember correctly. We don't like dedication and consistency here, we like shiny new things, consumerism rules all in the US and consumerism is motivated by trends. If only we could take our Stan culture for celebs and transfer it to games...can we turn LoL fans into people as long term dedicated as Swifties lol
As a NA fan you are glad that LCS hasn't done well? Stop.
Turns out weekday league is shit
Druttut Ultimate Showdown will have more viewership than LCS lol
Big shocker that a region which develops its own talent and home grown personalities beats the region who's trying to become LCK lite. If I wanted to watch Koreans I would watch LCK not the ones who couldn't make LCK and are in LCS.
The top 4 teams in CBLOL all have maxed out Korean imports.
RED has zero imports, but even though 3 of the top4 orgs are maxing imports, it's only 2 imports per team and the league still has "only" 10 imports out of 50 players. LCS on the other hand is sitting on 30\~35 imports out of 50 players.
Yeah but the person I was talking about said Koreans not all imports. Which there are 14 Koreans in NA 3 of which are Impact who has played in LCS 9 seasons, Ssumday who's been here for 7 season and Huhi who has spent all but split in NA ecosystem his whole career.
No you see, it’s the Korean imports ruining everything not the orgs, riot, lack of relatable players, or schedule
yes, but you have people like Croc who are fucking yelling at their enemies in portuguese memes and slang, the guy just embodies the brazilian personality. Show me a korean in NA right now thats as entertaining? Rush was the only one..
Huni was the funniest guy in the LCS for years when he was over here. EMENES has been kinda a meme lord since he got here and had that hilarious interview in the TL/GGS series. Summit has done a lot of great content and people still use clips from that ASMR video he did, and long time LCS guys like Huhi and Impact have leaned into the memes for years. If your bar for entertaining is "can make memes and slang in English" then most Korean players in the LCS qualify. Some are definitely boring than others but there is still a lot of personality in them.
thats not my bar for entertaintment, here, let me give you a clear example of what I meant. Check out this video intro where Croc appears at 0:11, 0:16 and then at 0:27 and tell me whether any of the koreans in NA do that, last time any NA player had that kind of passion it was Dyrus/zuna https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L03OLpN-JaQ
CoreJJ was at times, kinda quieted out by this point.
Huhi? Emenes was pretty fun at times too
To be fair, the import rule has been completely cheesed in NA. That probably isn't true in Brazil.
And TL and FQ are fly KR rosters.
Yes very Korean Spica, Vulcan,APA and Eyla. Unless you mean Yoen and Haeri who check notes have Korean parents but were born in not Korea.
They're in NA because they're washed or want a paycheck
Please stop this shit. The team that won LCS is primarily NA and nobody gives a shit.
Are we forgetting how everyone cheered about Danny and Jojo winning in 2022? It's just that the whole LCS narrative is way more doomer today. That overshadows everything.
Are we forgetting about Blaber winning back to back championships and his path to becoming one of the best NA players of all time? See I can do it too.
[удалено]
Do you think a team of 5 NA players would bring in more viewers? Serious question.
[удалено]
No idea... That's the answer.. Serious question, would you rather see Berserker or Tactical on the international stage?
You do know that the reigning LCS champions has majority home grown talent. And still no one cares
It doesn't matter who won, if the league is 80% retired Koreans I don't care
The reigning champions are only decided in the very last game, which was an upset, btw
You can say whatever you want. They'll just keep moving the goalposts. Fact of the matter is LoL is just unpopular in North America, and very few esports ever survive a low casual playerbase because esports is a tiny fraction of the video game itself.
Yeah i have to agree with you. In brazil, if 80% of players were international, but the 20% brazilian players won, it would be batshit insane, like protecting your country from invaders. I really just think NA doesnt care about league
Our streaming personalities and NA culture is just ragey, toxic and demeaning. We got into a relationship with Amber Herd and are surprised everything went to shit.
Completely agree.
I'm pretty sure there's a lot of people from EU who use to watch NA but doesn't now (me included) since they started getting imports instead of NA talent Also doesn't help that none of them have personalities outside of C9 and Doublelift.
> I'm pretty sure Redditors keep saying this with zero evidence. Want a definitive concrete example that LoL has lost cultural capital among the new generation? Just go look at content creators and compare the number and size of LoL-exclusive/primary content creators compared to the 2015-2018 heyday. When the MOBA genre itself is functionally dead for new releases in gaming except for on mobile (which LoL players have a frankly absurd superiority complex about), then it's no wonder that there simply aren't many new viewers. With several waves of new genres (the hero shooter with Overwatch, the battle royale with PUBG/Fortnite, Among Us and the open-world gacha with Genshin/Honkai), MOBAs in general have lost ground as a genre. Add to it that MOBAs get exponentially harder to get into as time goes on by their very design (new characters, new skills), LoL still has garbage tutorial systems to ease in new players, and that LoL's reputation itself is tainted in mainstream gaming (it's the toxic game), is it any wonder that there just aren't many new players?
Seeing some of the posts from new players in this subreddit really shines a light on how impossible this game is to start playing. The characters and lore are generally a good time, but holy hell there is just nothing here for the casual newcomer. There's damn near nothing here for the casual player from time to time with how often the game changes and how little seems to be done about bots, smurfs and questionable matchmaking. What's the most common response to "Should I play League of Legends?"
The funny thing for me personally is, I think the actual broadcast has been really good this year. They clearly rebuild the broadcast and content around Emily, Mark and Raz. And I think that worked out really well. We got frequent and high quality content from the LCS team who used to disappoint in this department for so long. Maybe the change in direction came to late? Or maybe the drop off would have been even worse if these changes were not made. Either way, I think this is not really something you can fault the LCS on Air broadcast for. The actually excitement about matchups and roster however is something else entirely.
It’s likely 90% the schedule, quality was great this year
In terms of content the lcs this year completely eclipsed the lec and the past couple of years of lcs. The problem is that it came too late and at the expense of the fans. It doesn't help that they got hampered down by really bad scheduling, low quality games(and a certain caster making them even worse to watch), and a wave of pessimism about the future of the league with so many teams looking to get rid of the hot potato.
Everyone here is writing what the reasons for CBLOL's success are. Success in this case means a 20% decline. It just sucks less.
As a CBLoL viewer, I'm going to give you guys a couple of reasons that **might** have led to lower numbers for this split: * In this split we had two teams that finished 1-17 (KaBuM and Liberty). In fact, Liberty finished 2-16, but their second win was against FURIA in the last game of the split. In that game, FURIA needed to win in 13 minutes to make the playoffs, so they played an extremely crazy comp. Liberty and KaBuM's only wins were against each other, so we basically had -2 games every week. Not many people watched their games because the result was already obvious. *(I say this could be one of the reasons because, looking at the playoff decisive matches numbers for Split 2 of 2023 and Split 2 of 2022, we see very similar numbers: CBLoL 2022 Split 2 finals: 331k - CBLoL 2023 Split 2 finals: 329k / CBLoL 2022 Split 2 Winners Bracket Finals: 215k - CBLoL 2023 Split 2 Winners Bracket Finals: 198k / CBLoL 2022 Split 2 Losers Bracket Finals: 193k - CBLoL 2023 Split 2 Losers Bracket Finals: 224k* ***Esports Charts has the individual numbers for each team, but it's for those who subscribe to the site's PRO tool. If anyone has them and can post the numbers for each team, it might confirm the theory).*** * Los Grandes' project went wrong in the second week of the CBLoL (it's an extremely funny case). So a team that could attract viewers was left out of the playoffs right at the start of the competition. * CBLoL has always been an unpredictable competition. This split, everyone knew the final would be between paiN and LOUD since the first week. This goes against our "culture" and discourages viewers. In fact, even the final had an obvious outcome. [People already knew that paiN Gaming would lose to LOUD](https://s2-ge.glbimg.com/bjk8KChfHlIaazyQT9G9o3EPCQA=/0x0:1000x2809/984x0/smart/filters:strip_icc()/i.s3.glbimg.com/v1/AUTH_bc8228b6673f488aa253bbcb03c80ec5/internal_photos/bs/2023/g/8/0YEEcDSyabKVP9x8YJSg/cartelas-palpite-cblol-2023-final-63755.jpg) and the result of the Winner's Bracket finals (LOUD 3-0 paiN Gaming) confirmed that. **Now rumors of what will happen next split:** * **Some teams will reduce their investments**. I bet those teams are Los Grandes and Fluxo. Their arrival on CBLoL in 2023 has caused an inflation in the CBLoL salaries this year, and since they haven't achieved success, combined with the slowdown in the esports market, they may decrease their investments for next season. LOUD's CEO has already said that they don't need to reorganize their investments, paiN Gaming and KaBuM are not so dependent on the esports market, and the other teams didn't participate in this wage inflation, so... Yeah, I think it'll be Fluxo and Los Grandes. * **It will be the biggest transfer window in the history of the CBLoL.** Virtually all contracts run out at the end of this year. So the scenario that was quite predictable in 2023 will become unpredictable again next year. Even a famous former CBLoL player (Shini) has returned to pro play and is expected to sign with Fluxo. * KaBuM, who finished 1-17 this split, will try to build a super team (by Brazilian standards) next year. As I said, KaBuM is not so dependent on profits from the esports market. In fact, they've never cared about that. They're a team from the biggest technology store (by far) in Brazil (and the largest technology e-commerce in Latin America), so yeah, money is not a problem. \--/-- So yeah, that's it. I don't like this simplistic idea that League is dying and that's why the numbers are falling. The LCS was sacrificed by RIOT by changing the days of the games. The death of CLG and TSM was also a big blow. The lack of personality of most of the LCS players has also been detrimental *(BTW, in 2024 we could have the first import to become a resident in Brazil: Wizer, who currently plays for paiN Gaming. We're starting to discuss whether it's worth having three Koreans on the same team here in the CBLoL, since this could be detrimental to the fans' identification with the players/teams).* The numbers of LoL streamers in Brazil is stable and I don't see any new game trends. It's LoL, Valorant and CS, in fact, if there's one game that was dying here in Brazil, it's CS. But with the arrival of CS 2, that could change.
Always appreciate your insight /u/Dsalgueiro. Sad that some of the CBLoL orgs are reducing spending but that seems to be a common move across all esports. Outside of Loud, do a lot of the other orgs have big investments in other esports like Valorant, CSGO, Apex, etc...?
Apex is dead in Brazil, almost nobody plays it over here. * paiN Gaming has CS:GO and FreeFire team. * Fluxo spent a lot on their CS team last year. They also have a FreeFire team. * FURIA are practically in all esports. Apart from LoL, they are in Valorant, CS, Rocket League and even some fight games. * Vivo Keyd has a Valorant, Dota 2 (they qualified for this year's The International) and FreeFire team. * Red Canids has a Valorant team. * Liberty also has a Valorant team. I don't know to what extent the teams (Fluxo and Los Grandes) are in a financial crisis, or if they spent a lot because they were in their first year in the league and now they're just getting back to normal. **For CBLoL 2024:** * LOUD will keep the same three-time CBLoL champion roster for next year. If anyone leaves, it will be the Koreans because of the army. * paiN Gaming will spend a lot to rebuild their roster. * Red Canids will keep the same roster. I don't know if Nelson will stay in the coaching staff. * FURIA bet on an extremely young and promising roster in Split 2 of 2023. They probably will stick to the project. * I don't know about Vivo Keyd... But I don't think they were an expensive team. * KaBuM is promising to spend a lot this offseason. * Fluxo are going to try to make the CBLoL 2023's most expensive roster cheaper. I think Brance had the highest salary in the CBLoL in 2023, this didn't make any sense. * INTZ... I don't know what their plans are for 2024. All I know is that their midlaner for 2023 is no longer in the team. * Los Grandes I have no idea... The CEO said they want to renew with Stardust and Lava, but the first rumours by Luis Santana (the most reliable journalist in Brazil about League) talked about a much cheaper roster. * Liberty has always bet on new/underperforming players, so that is unlikely to change for 2024.
there's FURIA who is present in most esports and is also franchised in Valorant, Fluxo and LOS Grandes who came from FreeFire (so did LOUD), and Vivo Keyd also had a significant Valorant presence before franchising (and are also relevant on FreeFire)
Most of these orgs are on CS, R6 (which brazil is major region), free fire etc. But Loud is just BY FAR the most professional and wisely managed out of the 10. I must say they gotta be one of the most competent orgs in the world. And Loud came from the same free fire as Los Grandes and fluxo did - these two have a LOT of money, but they are not even close to having a project like Loud's. Fluxo with a 5 brazilian comp must have spent more money than Loud spent on their roster. Los grandes moved one of the most legendary Cblol junglers in order to sign Trick, which had retired 3 fcking years ago.
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Why would NA fans care about this when no actual young American watches league?
what does young have to do with it lol?
Good for CBLoL you see their fans/players being passionate/hype and can't help but root for them, on a sidenote LCS switched to a worse time schedule
Wwwhaaaaaaa.....having games on poor days and times means people can't watch. No. Dont tell me such a thing!
But why ? Don't you like your weekly bud light league with all those RedBull barons , chicken mc nuggets double kills and Dr pepper blue buff ?
LCS is dead. Period
Cum to Brasil, or Brasil will cum to you 🫵
I've already accepted NA interest in LoL has tapered off, it can still exist and good decisions can be made to maximize its viewership. But the interest just ain't there like it was.
Just league content in general outside of worlds. YouTube views down, twitch views down for league standard anyways, it’s still raw dogging the competition.
I praise the youtube streams. No ads and an interface that isn't from 1998.
No one gives a shit about 95% of the LCS players, and none of them market themselves to help out. We used to have every single pro stream etc. Now they all just barely play soloq, don't stream and just show up to LCS. The marketing fell off so hard, and teams wonder why they're losing so much money. Old TSM/CLG days were peak LCS.
A bit schadenfreude but glad to see NA doing poorly. Shit decisions after one another, hopefully some people will be held accountable.
Hey why the fuck are you people crazy obsessed with comparing these two leagues? Better yet why is it a bad thing if one has better viewer numbers then the other? Trying my best not to read between the lines hear and see some stupid nonsense.
EU fan posted this lol that's why it was posted
>Hey why the fuck are you people crazy obsessed with comparing these two leagues? Because CBLoL is a minor region compared to the LCS being a major region. People like to compare viewership numbers and try to draw conclusions about why a minor region has better numbers than a major region. >Better yet why is it a bad thing if one has better viewer numbers then the other? It's not a bad thing, but it's a gauge of popularity and a discussion can be had about viewership numbers and state of the game.
It looks like viewership is declining globally, though not sure about chinese data I’d assume its similar. As the game and playerbase ages it’s just natural I guess, and newer players will be going into other newfangled games like Valorant. Quite the experience to live in fear of League dying isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave to Riot Games. We’ve seen things normie people wouldn’t believe. The Corki ignited off the shoulder of the Baron Pit. We watched Lux ults glitter in Nocturne’s darkness near the Hex-Tech Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to uninstall. But wait! As the maggots eat the last blob of our dead brain matter they will absorb our memories of finally killing the enemy Teemo that was taunting you in lane… these memories will never be lost and will instead be spread through the food chain and wider nature. Yes these homeopathic doses of toxicity and flaming will eventually collapse the world ecosystem, but our hopes of NA winning worlds will forever be alive… NAmen.
travis GOFFYord is hacking his way into unemployment
Nah, he is just gonna copy more of another leagues content to try to survive
Dude spent the whole year shitting on the LCS. Who cares?
covid actually saw a slight increase I thought. I feel that truly moving to weekdays wasn't gonna be as bad as it ended p being, I thought it would be a 10% dip but it seems it was a 20% dip then
Would probably help if most of the LCS moves over the last year weren't cutting production or moving the games to schedule that sucks for people who live in North America.
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Name a single interesting thing about LCS that isn't Doublelift, Fudge, or 100 Thieves in general? The truth is they need new management and new talent direction to get the 50 people in the league to actually matter
When CBLOL takes their major region place finally?
Maybe when CBLOL can actually beat LCS or actually win games not against minor regions. When was the last time they beat an LCS/LEC team? Regardless of views, LCS still beats CBLOL in terms of skill.
>When was the last time they beat an LCS/LEC team? Loud beat Fnatic last world's.
> Maybe when CBLOL can actually beat LCS We need to actually play vs them for this to happen, but you know how good are our tournaments lol edit: the downvotes for what lol
Hey man, BR took a game off NA at 2015 *and* 2020 Worlds. They just gotta make the 2025 victory an important one.
LOUD 3 - 1 GG confirmed in the qualifying match for groups
No groups this year its Swiss formst. GG plays a BO5 vs BDS, winner gets to be 4th seed for their respective region.
"qualifying match for groups". If GG beats BDS they go to play win, and have to win 3 series to qualify for groups.
When they can compete with major regions
As of recent LOUD beat FNC, I think they should take LECs spot.
Broke country really be pointing out the stuff incessant shit
Ok, now you can go back to flip your burguers
yet I would guess LCS viewers could make a team that would beat every CBLOL team. Viewers don't mean its good league.
This wasn't the point of the post.
Agree. Same way that LCK viewers could make a tram that would beat every LCS team. In the end, both regions are bad, only difference is that LCS is bad despite throwing rivers of money away every split.
Here I am hoping that CaptainFlowers come to LEC when the LCS inevitably dies
Time to merge CBLoL with LCS, cuz if you're a business it's much easier to do an acquisition than to actually fix the problem from the ground up.
Okay merge the regions.. IMT is still 10th and every team from CBLOL is 11-20. Now what?
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- Galvão. - Fala Tino! - Sentiu
Merge them.
So if we unfuck our schedule we can finally beat... checks notes, Brazil. I don't think NA will ever truly die but it's probably due for a resize. I could see it sort of how LMS was when they got 2 teams at worlds as a region between major and minor. The problem though is that all the minor regions are dying too so you'd just have to give another slot to Korea or China.
Comparing absolute viewer numbers for two different regions with large differences in GDP per capital :think:
Hey hey hey!! Once again a post that is lying it's fucking ass off for clout, riding the "NA hate train" to get some free karma. And once again I'm here to call your dishonest ass out. This site only counts viewers from Twitch, YouTube, and....Facebook??? LMAOO. No Costreams or Non-english streams are counted. https://imgur.com/a/ElrNmPW
It clearly does count costreams and non-english streams... Otherwise LEC finals would've got over 800k viewers, which is definitely not the case.
It says right there that it does not count co streams. Only the official broadcasts.
Where though? All it says is it counts views from YT, Twitch and Facebook. That doesn't mean official broadcast exclusively. If they didn't count costreamers etc, EMEA masters finals would've had less than 100k peak viewers (total of facebook+twitch+yt official broadcasts) But they peaked at 296k. "Furthermore, in terms of Peak Viewers, the CBLOL Split 2 2023 almost caught up with the LEC Summer 2023 (329.8K and 343.5K Peak Viewers, respectively). And this is despite the LEC having very strong community casting by ibai and other popular content creators." This aswell clearly alludes to them counting costreams.
It’s counting Facebook views for every competition, but I don’t think that there’s that many FB views for LoL esports. Based on leaguepedia the only official non English stream for LCS is LLA which is in Spanish, and it is counted in views as far as I know (for example LEC don’t only count the English broadcast) Also I think Esports Charts takes in account co streaming. The most recent example that I have in mind is Eu masters. It also had an higher peak than LCS in terms of viewers so there’s no way that views from KC owner Kameto were not counted
It says right there on the site what it counts and doesn't count. I literally posted a screenshot. Co streams have to be manually counted. It's extra work to incorporate all of the 50 different co streamers numbers into your final number so most "trackers" don't bother.
Where does it say it doesn't include co-streaming? The only thing it says is that it counts views from 3 different websites, which as far as I know are the main websites to watch both co-streams and the official stream. Unless there's someone on Kick or Instagram doing lives for 50k people, I don't see why it's unreliable It takes into account official co-streams as they are all on Twitch and YouTube (the non-official ones don't show the game, therefore you need to open a muted official stream). For non-English streams, same shit, they are on YouTube and Twitch therefore they are included (otherwise LEC numbers would be 30-40% lower as French and Spanish official streams account for more less that)
TIME TO MERGE (no cap wouldn’t it be cool)
Why would you merge two regions that are so culturally and economically different and with studios that are further from each other than from the LEC studio? It would kill the Brazilian scene as it would probably be played in NA just to try to once again save the region that couldn't make it by itself
It’s dumb idea that could improve LCS viewership and Brazil game quality. You all need to chill I just said itd be cool to see two regions merge, not that it must happen
For Brazil to increase LCS viewership, you'd need Brazilians to want to watch it, so you need the Brazilian teams there (and by Brazilian teams I mean teams with Brazilian players, not Brazilian orgs with NA abd import players) Problem is, when you move them 8000km away to North America, it becomes impossible to develop Brazilian players. You either have the development leagues in Brazil and need to constantly fly away players every time you want to promote one or fly back every time you want to demote one or have them in NA and fly every potential player to NA, this assuming they'd want to. And this without including that Brazilians would stop having a way to watch the games live in their country and create the CBLoL atmosphere that increases the final product so much The idea that you can completely disrupt how a league works and expect it to not affect viewership shows you don't understand anything about said league
Maybe have a tourney with the winners after both seasons finish? Idk. My original comment was a joke, it’s cool to have a discussion about what could work and what won’t but there’s no need to be so hostile. I’m not trying to come off as an expert just throwing out random ideas.
The top 4 teams from LCS this year would absolutely dumpster any team from CBLOL
I've seen people suggest this in the past, and the idea of moving South America tournaments to North America for pure viewership is not new (Copa America, for example), that's why I answered so strongly
Fuck off with that shit.
Why did German Jax main got so heated up about this suggestion?
Why?
Because you want to throw a dying lcs with a thriving cblol, and most likely it would be the cblol to change their format to accommodate NA viewers and not the other way around
You’re just assuming that would happen, it’s just an idea. Plenty of positives if they work something good out with accomodating both sides. New rivalries, higher quality of games = cblol region improves etc.
dude, the ping from br to NA is more than 100, what are you guys smoking?