The League of Legends Worlds 2019 tournament hasn’t even reached its finals yet, and it’s already played host to an impressive new feat. The quarter-final showdown between teams SK Telecom and Splyce yesterday set a new record for the highest peak audience for an esports event broadcast, topping Fortnite’s previous total of around 2.3 million.
As spotted by The Loadout, esports analytics site ESCharts indicates that the LoL Worlds match at one point saw a peak viewer count of 2,504,751. That’s pretty huge, and surpasses the peak number of concurrent viewers seen at the inaugural Fortnite World Cup solos final this summer, 2,334,826 – until now, the reigning record.
However, with the semi-finals and final on the way, and judging by the number of people viewing some of the other LoL Worlds matches this year already, it looks likely that this record might not stand for very long. ESCharts also shows that the quarter-finals showdown between teams G2 Esports and Damwon Gaming hit over 2.1 million peak viewers, with three of SK Telecom’s group stage matches in the tournament also not far behind this figure.
Though it’s an impressive new number, this might not be a huge surprise given how big League of Legends viewership is at the moment. According to both SullyGnome and Twitch Metrics, on streaming platform Twitch it’s the most-watched videogame in terms of both average viewers and watch time, with quite a big lead. The next most-watched game, Fortnite, appears to have seen around 40k fewer hours in average viewer time than LoL over the last 30 days (at the time of writing).
The League of Legends Worlds 2019 semi-finals kick off November 2, with the grand final bringing the battling to its conclusion on November 10.