China’s international VALORANT debut attracts largest opening match viewership at a VCT event

Both excitement and expectations were high for the international VALORANT debut of EDward Gaming and the region of China, and the opening match at Champions 2022 between EDG and Paper Rex today delivered plenty of thrills and views.

Before the conclusion of map one, which also saw the competitive debut of the map Pearl, the match reached a peak viewership of at least 760,000 viewers, according to Esports Charts. This figure is easily the highest viewership figure for the opening match of any international VCT event yet. During map two, it reached over 786,000 viewers, surpassing the grand finals of VCT Masters Copenhagen.

This number was a group effort between official streams and co-streams across multiple platforms. Aside from the official VALORANT channels on Twitch and YouTube, the official Japanese streams were also heavy contributors, as were the co-streams from creators like tarik, TenZ, and Mixwell.

The peak viewership figure for the entire Masters Copenhagen tournament was 783,985 viewers, which was achieved during the grand final between FunPlus Phoenix and Paper Rex. Masters Copenhagen as a whole attracted the worst viewership numbers of any international VCT event, but this was due to a variety of factors: many of the teams attending had already qualified for Champions, the tournament was going head-to-head with a number of premier events, and teams representing major viewership regions like Japan and Brazil were eliminated early.

The early results in terms of viewership at Champions are a welcome sign following the lackluster results from Copenhagen. And with other regions scheduled to clash when the stakes get higher, Champions 2022 could easily set some more records.