China’s Debut in International Valorant Breaks Viewership Records

China is competing in an international Valorant Champions Tour (VCT) event for the first time as EDWard Gaming (EDG) made its debut at Valorant Champions 2022 last night. The matchup between EDG and Paper Rex became the most viewed opening match across all VCT events till date with over 760,000 peak concurrent viewers tuning in, according to data from Esports Charts.

The Valorant community came together to contribute to the high viewership

Valorant viewership dipped considerably in recent times with the previous Masters event getting some of the lowest viewership numbers we have seen for VCT events. But the explosive start to the ongoing Champions 2022 event bolstered interest and the game’s viewership is back on track.

The Valorant content creator community helped boost the viewership with its watch parties. With a lot of big content creators and pro players not making it to the Champions 2022 event, fans are tuning in to their streams. Tyson “TenZ” Ngo’s stream received over 1.4 Million views compared to the 200,000 to 300,000 total views he normally gets per stream. Tarik "tarik" Celik had over 675,000 total views in his watch party and other creators too helped bring in hundreds of thousands of total views.

China is one of the biggest and most important regions for esports and EDWard Gaming is an established name in League of Legends esports with the organization securing the 2021 world championship. However, EDG’s Valorant debut was disappointing as Paper Rex secured the win last night. Now EDG will have to go up against Team Liquid in hopes of staying in the competition. If the team fails to win its next game, it will be eliminated from the world championship.

This is the last time we will have an open competition format for the Valorant Champions Tour and it marks the era of the format laid out by Riot Games three years ago. Starting next year, the game will move towards franchised leagues which means that there will be a lot more Valorant esports content for fans to consume and if you can’t get enough of pro matches, 2023 has some exciting stuff ahead.