With LCS viewership tanking, how is LEC Summer faring?

There has been a lot of discussion in the League of Legends community around whether the LCS is dying. Meanwhile, across the pond, what did the first week of LEC Summer tell us?

Alarm bells have started ringing for LCS after the first week of the Summer split posted the worst opening day viewership on record. The North American league’s viewership numbers improved slightly on Thursday and Friday, but as the first week came to an end, the LCS had a paltry 67,800 average viewers and only one match with over 100,000 concurrent viewers.

Many were curious to see whether this drop would carry over to LEC Summer, which began on Saturday, June 17. Three days into the split, it seems clear that there is a fall-off in viewership, though the situation is not nearly as bleak as in the LCS.

The first week of LEC Summer 2023 had a peak viewership of 343,576 viewers, only a 1.3% decrease when compared to the Spring split, according to data firm Esports Charts. However, the drop is much more significant when we consider average viewership (17%) and hours watched (15.4%).

If we compare to the first week of LEC Winter 2023 — the first split of the league’s new, three-split format —, the decrease is much more steep across the board. Below are the opening week stats in each of the three splits:

The most popular match of the first week of the 2023 Summer Split pitted MAD Lions against KOI — the only game that cracked 300,000 concurrent viewers. Its peak was 17.4% higher than the LEC Summer 2022’s opening week peak of over 292,000 viewers during the game between G2 Esports and EXCEL.

But despite a higher peak viewership when compared to the 2022 Summer Split, the first week had fewer viewers as a whole than it did last year. The league averaged 173,939 viewers, down from over 190,000 during the 2022 Summer Split’s first week.

LEC Summer 2023 viewership is bound to increase as we get deeper into the split, which features three different stages (the regular season, the group stage and the playoffs). But the early signs point toward the Summer Split continuing the trend of declining viewership in Europe’s top League of Legends competition split-on-split.