Riot Games has released their official viewership data for the 2018 Mid-Season Invitational, which was held between May 3-20, in Berlin and Paris. The tournament brought together the first place teams from each of Riot’s 17 regional leagues, marking it as the first Riot-produced international League of Legends tournament of 2018.

According to the official release, the 2018 Mid-Season Invitational accrued 363M total hours watched across all channels and platforms. The finals between China’s representative Royal Never Give Up (RNG) and Kingzone Dragon X from South Korea was watched by 60M unique viewers, peaked at 19.8M concurrent viewers, and averaged 11M concurrent viewers.

Riot’s post was extremely detailed about their methodology for determining these numbers. The publisher was also clear that this blog was meant to refute estimates that came out directly after the event. For example, the viewership numbers from Esports Charts, which reported a peak concurrent viewership at 127.6M concurrent viewers—126.7M of which reportedly originated from China—were the most widely cited. This figure is nearly 6.5 times the number reported by Riot.

Why 126.7M Peak Chinese Concurrents Was Dubious at Release

Historically, sites that utilized numbers scraped directly from Chinese streaming platforms have not been a reliable source for viewership, at least when comparing their numbers to official reports. For example, initial reports estimated that the 2016 League of Legends World Championship peaked at 28.3M viewers—26.8M of which originated from China. This claim was similarly refuted by Riot Games, who reported that the concurrent viewers for the event peaked at 14.7M, roughly half of the initial estimate.

It’s a common esports adage that Chinese viewership metrics are unreliable. Inflated viewership metrics are likely a result of server instability for Chinese streaming sites. Platforms that rely on the methodology of pulling data directly from Chinese sites’ APIs could be unreliable, especially compared to Western sites like Twitch and YouTube.

What’s more, according to the most recently available data, there are over 110M Chinese League of Legends players. While it is plausible that some Chinese viewers of MSI do not play League of Legends, it is unlikely that every single player and an additional 16.3M people tuned in to watch MSI. Riot themselves use monthly active player counts—the number of unique League of Legends players in the last 30 days—as a validation tool. This number is bound to be much smaller than the raw number of accounts ever registered in China, the 110M number cited above.

Contextualizing Riot’s Viewership Growth

While the peak of 19.8M concurrent viewers is a far cry from the estimates that were initially reported, this figure is a major accomplishment for Riot.

According to Riot’s official 2017 Mid-Season Invitational numbers, the event peaked at 4.3M concurrent viewers. This means that year-over-year MSI’s peak concurrent viewers grew by 3.6 times. Additionally, the concurrent viewers for the finals grew from 2.5M on average to an average viewership of 11M, an increase of 3.4 times.

One explanation for higher viewership could be that the teams that made it to the finals. Of course, having a Chinese team in the finals helped fulfill China’s large viewership potential, but perhaps even more importantly, the most popular Chinese League of Legends pro Jian “Uzi” Zi-Hao led RNG to victory. Uzi has regularly been compared to SK Telecom T1 legend Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, but until 2018’s MSI the Chinese player had never managed to win an international event.

Cheering on national heroes has always lead to increased viewership for esports events. For example, in January Cloud9 became the first ever North American team to win a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Major . This Major, hosted by Turner and IMG’s ELEAGUE, set the record for the highest ever peak concurrent viewership on Twitch, at 1.1M.

Riot has some speculation as to why the event was successful. In their official blog post, they state, “Largely this [success] was a result of new platforms carrying the broadcast, scheduling that made MSI accessible to larger numbers of fans, and new tactics that drove awareness of the event up.”

The data, including initial reports, backup this reasoning from Riot. In particular, the evidence that the event’s scheduling had a positive impact on viewership is overwhelming.

According the chart, the peak occurred at 4 pm Central European Time. This is plausible given the scheduled match start time was 12:15pm Central European Time. This would put the maximum viewer count at roughly 10 PM in China, during peak streaming hours.

Key Takeaways

As Riot stated, “Estimates that are publicized immediately after an event are fun for discussion, but their accuracy should be taken with a grain of salt.”

Despite the widely reported figures of 126.7M peak concurrent viewers in China or 127.6M concurrent viewers overall, there were many reasons to think this figure was inaccurate at the time of the initial reports.

Related: How Riot is Utilizing Esports to Reach Casual Fans at MSI 2018

Unfortunately, it was unclear to many that these numbers were initial estimates unverified by the platforms or Riot. This lead to an inaccurate impression that 2018’s Mid-Season Invitational was the most watched esports event ever.

Going forward, audiences and outlets should use this as a learning experience. Being skeptical of reports is the correct approach, especially in the immediate aftermath of an event.