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World Championship
Worlds 2026
According to Esports Charts, which does not track Chinese platforms, the tournament has logged 45 matches and 100 hours 40 minutes of airtime since the Play-In opened in Los Angeles on 15 October. Its peak of 3,605,295 concurrent viewers came during Bilibili Gaming's 3-1 semifinal win over T1. Average viewership stands at 1,131,646.
Last year’s Worlds finished with a 6.75 million peak, set during the T1–KT Rolster final, and an average of 1,494,960. Saturday’s final will lift both 2026 figures, but the event enters its last weekend with an average 24.3% below 2025.
T1 own the top of the table
T1 feature in three of the five most-watched series. Their semifinal defeat to BLG leads at 3,605,295, ahead of their 3-1 quarterfinal win over Karmine Corp at 2,800,537. The only other series past two million is the first semifinal, Gen.G's 3-0 sweep of Invictus Gaming, which peaked at 2,196,232. The other two places in the top five come from the Swiss Stage, where T1’s day-two meeting with Dplus KIA reached 1,836,077, and G2 Esports against Hanwha Life Esports drew 1,785,416 on day seven. That G2 series is the only entry without T1 that was not a semifinal.
Among the three quarterfinals without T1, BLG’s sweep of Dplus KIA drew the biggest audience at 1,640,662, with Gen.G's 3-0 win over LYON about 8% lower. The KC series beat both by more than 1.1 million viewers.
Played at 23:00 in Paris on a Friday, an easy slot for European viewers but 7:00 on Saturday morning in Korea, the KC series also showed how much the French audience can add. Kamel "Kameto" Kebir's co-stream alone peaked at 262,641 viewers on Twitch during the series. KC had already doubled French-language viewership in the Play-In compared to 2025, and their opening series against Cloud9 peaked at 1.02 million, the highest figure of that stage.
Every stage down on 2025, with one exception
The Play-In's 1.02 million peak was the lowest for the opening stage since 2019, when DAMWON against Lowkey Esports reached 1,006,908. That is less than half of last year's peak, although 2025 was an outlier: T1 played that Play-In, and their Bo5 against Invictus Gaming drew about 2.5 million.. The 2026 Play-In also finished almost 29% below 2024.
The Swiss Stage peaked at 1,836,125, a 28.4% fall from 2025 and far from the 3,015,398 recorded in 2024. Three Swiss series passed two million last year, against none this time. Average viewership held up better at 1,008,817, down 4.9% year-on-year and 33.2% on 2024. That makes 2026 the weakest Swiss Stage since the format arrived in 2023, when it peaked at 1,956,163 and averaged 1,106,302. It still sits well clear of the last group stage in 2022, which peaked at 1,390,933 and averaged 826,034.
In the knockouts, T1 vs KC sits about 29% below the T1–Anyone's Legend quarterfinal of 2025, which peaked at nearly 3.92 million. Gen.G vs IG fell 29.7% short of last year's first semifinal between Gen.G and KT Rolster, at 3,124,347. T1 vs BLG is the exception, finishing 0.2% above the T1–Top Esports semifinal of 2025, the only knockout series to keep pace.
Worlds 2022, the last edition held in North America, peaked at 5.1 million during the DRX–T1 final. Every final since has passed six million with T1 on stage, and the 2024 decider against BLG still holds the all-time record at 6,856,769.
Why the peaks dropped
Worlds viewership has leaned on T1 for years, and the difference in 2026 lies in how many high-stakes series they played. In 2025 they came through the Play-In as the LCK's fourth seed, played five series in the Swiss Stage and needed a final-round win over Movistar KOI to reach the quarterfinals. This year they went through at 3-1 and never faced a series with elimination on the line. With fewer must-win T1 games, the event lost its biggest spikes, and the drop shows most clearly in the Korean figures above.
Hosting in North America pushed the broadcast into difficult hours for Asia. The semifinals started at 16:00 in Allen, Texas, which is 23:00 in Paris and 7:00 the next morning in Seoul. Korean viewers had to follow the Play-In in the middle of the night. Worlds 2022, also held in North America, is the only other edition whose Play-In peak fell year-on-year.
On the co-streaming side, Marc "Caedrel" Lamont is the most-watched channel of the event, with a 480,966 peak and 22,233,403 hours watched. That is about 19.5% of the tournament's total watch time on one channel, and his average of 224,202 viewers is close to a fifth of the event's own. Kameto's numbers during the KC run tell the same story for the French-speaking audience.
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