Despite starting the year with massive layoffs, Riot Games managed to bring the LEC - League of Legends' EMEA elite - on a new level and reached a significant milestone this weekend breaking all previous viewership records. According to a tweet from Riot's Director of Esports, Maximilian Peter "MAXtheX" Schmidt, fans have watched over 72 million hours of LEC content this year, making it the most-viewed season in LEC history. To put this in perspective, that’s equivalent to 3,000 days or more than eight years of non-stop content.

A month ago, we detailed what strategic changes Riot Games implemented to reach such viewership numbers this year, and especially to stop the bleeding they faced since 2020. As they allowed co-streaming, giving power to streamers and teams with very highly engaging fanbase, it is no surprise we reach these numbers that came out only after BDS versus Fnatic match this weekend. We can even expect the numbers to go higher after Mad Lions KOI's victory against G2 Esports offering a potential thrilling scenario in the Season Finals, with two Worlds spots still to be granted.

A result dependant evolution

If we take a deeper look in the numbers, it is interesting to see the Winter Split collected the highest numbers of viewers, mainly due to Karmine Corp's arrival in the league, MDK reaching the grand final and also, that people are extremely engaging when it comes to new forming rosters at the beginning of the year. The league’s five most-viewed matches of the year so far have all featured either MDK or Karmine Corp with number one game being MDK's Winter playoffs final against G2 which peaked at 830,816 viewers and marked the league’s highest since 2021.

But being highly dependent on some team's fanbases means their results and journey through the different splits will also affect viewership. Which is also the main reason why viewership slowed down in Spring and Summer as KC and MDK both failed to reach high highs again. This shows as peak viewership figures are down from Winter (830,816) to Spring (593,554) to Summer (417,113) splits of this year despite having the old kings, G2 and Fnatic facing in the grand final.