League of Legends 2023 MSI sees lowest finals viewership since 2019

The League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational saw its grand finals hold the lowest viewership for the tournament since 2019.

The Mid-Season Invitational for League of Legends has come and gone. Throughout the tournament, plenty of teams battled it out for ultimate supremacy, with the two Chinese teams reaching the grand finals.

Rival Chinese teams JDG and BLG faced off against one another in the grand finals, with JDG eventually taking down BLG in a 3-1 victory, taking home the tournament.

After the dust had settled, players noticed that the viewership for MSI 2023’s grand final was rather low. The match had a peak viewership of 1.1 million viewers, the lowest for a grand final since the 2019 event.

MSI 2023 with lowest viewership for grand finals since 2019

According to Esports Charts, the grand final had a peak viewership of 1.1 million viewers. This is a considerable drop from the previous Mid-Season invitational events, whose grand finals saw 2.2 million and 1.8 million viewers in 2022 and 2021 respectively.

One reason for the lower-than-usual viewership was the fact that it was an all-Chinese clash as opposed to a cross-region match, which always results in more hype.

It’s worth noting that Esports Charts is unable to count Chinese viewership, which could’ve easily painted the numbers in a more positive light. However, according to a Twitter comment, even Chinese viewership was lower for the finals, with their most viewed match being the clash between T1 and BLG.

Despite the slightly-underwhelming viewership numbers during the final, it is important to note that MSI 2023 had the most-viewed match in the history of the tournament series. Its average viewership of 796,860 people and number of hours watched (61,557,385) are also the highest in MSI history.