The Tyler1 Championship Series is perhaps the most well-known amateur League of Legends tournament in North America. Following this year’s event, the tournament’s host and popular streamer Tyler “Tyler1” Steinkamp said he has special plans for the next iteration of the TCS.
“We are going to an actual official, official huge stadium for next TCS,” Tyler1 said at the end of this year’s event. “We’re flying them in. It’s going to be fucking huge. This will be our last TCS like this.”
Tyler1’s tournament boasted an impressive $50,000 prize pool this year for an amateur event run by a streamer. He began the series in 2017 with a more modest prize pool of $10,000. The single-elimination tournament has 16 teams and is played using a best-of-one format until the finals, which are a best-of-three.
Tyler’s announcement follows a declining viewership for his event, despite an increase in the tournament’s prize pool. This year’s event, which ran from Dec. 14 to 21, averaged 53,757 viewers, according to data collected by Esports Charts. The event peaked at 90,431 with a total of 1.8 million hours watched across 34 hours of airtime.
Those figures are down from last year when the event averaged 84,733 viewers, peaking at 123,229. The event had fewer hours of airtime than this year—only 21 hours—but still almost outperformed this year in terms of hours watched with 1.77 million.
Last year, however, the event was scheduled slightly differently. Instead of taking place over one week before the holidays, the 2018 TCS started on Nov. 24 and was played through Dec. 2. The timing for this year’s TCS may be part of the reason why viewership declined.
