Huge VCT Downfall

First week Kickoff peak viewership 2024 vs 2025
Americas Kickoff 2024 viewers hit 590k vs. Kickoff 2025 hit 350k.
Pacific Kickoff 2024 viewers hit 460k vs. Kickoff 2025 hit 370k.
EMEA Kickoff 2024 viewers hit 290k vs. Kickoff 2025 hit 330k.
If Riot keeps thinking Valorant can achieve what LoL achieved and continues to follow the old-school LoL style, they will end up as just another mid-tier competitive game forever.

Emea is increasing because the quality is increasing

The others decrease because quality decrease

In average, 447k(2024) to 350k(2025)

but bro, kickoff isn't even over yet
we haven't even had one qualification game

It tends to happen to esports tho like when the game is new people tend to watch it cuz everyone is watching it you can say it's like a trend but as time goes on the trend diminishes and those people who are not core fans of valo stops watching VCT or even stops playing the game , to play the games that is trending at present. So ig the core fans will still watch it and after some time the viewership will stay constant until the game becomes super old

The peak should be finals

WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT.

In 2024:
The bracket was made such that we had a SEN team that finally had hope (bringing hype and so many viewers), a LOUD team that people still rallied behind because saadhak less (brazilian viewers + can qck live up to aspas), a LEV with the first team aspas has ever left loud for + c0m + kingg and tex all on one team (more hype and viewers), and a 100T roster with piggy man himself boostio coming off a champs win to revive the squad

Of COURSE americas will be worse in viewers when:

• Brazil's hope in MIBR dies instantly with the 100T ass whooping
• SEN lose Tenz and Sacy, two incredible players but also huge for viewership
• LOUD lost their 2 most iconic players left from the 2022 squad, and no one cares about pancada anymore viewer wise
• all the opening stage matches end up being asswipes and not even close
• only good game throughout all of americas ends up being SEN 100T, and even then its not really close in scoreline

Look back at group B and you'll see that those games were not incredibly entertaining and close matches, and much better from a viewer perspective than this year, leading to less americas viewers

What should Riot do than>?

1 week and an idiot already calling it a "downfall" lmao

I feel for the sentiluls fans who refused to watch matches because they knew their team was barely winning, on the other side, every team is improving a lot, it must be so hard for them.

There are several reason why the Pacific and Americas leagues are struggling in particular:

Japanese teams are playing poorly and it is one of the largest contributors to Pacific viewership so less incentive to watch when your region is bad.

Tenz is gone (Many people from Asia including many Japanese fans used to tune into Americas to watch sentinels and most of them are loyal to Tenz- not sentinels(there was a 92% Drop in Japanese viewership for Vct Americas this kickoff compared to the previous one)

The Japanese T2 league is by FAR the most popular T2 region they peaked at nearly 220k viewers in VCL Japan 2024: Split 2 so it probably explains a major chunk of the viewership from pacific.

Now I should also note that this years format is different so people might be waiting for the more important matches (elimination / Semi finals / Grand Finals etc )

I would like to point out that in the 2024 bracket all the group stage games were practically done all in a week whereas this year we have had 0 elimination games so far.

I feel like if we compare the elim games then it will be much closer. Americas wont be as big as last year even with more core vct viewers, simply bc of the sen and loud run last year.

that 590k came in sen vs loud game
and 460k came in zeta vs T1 game
next week of games for americas and pacific should cross 400k even 500k (if the matches are close) considering they have sen vs loud and prx vs zeta.