League of Legends All-Star 2019 sees viewership drop

Syed Mujtaba Naqvi Published 09/12/2019

According to Esports Charts data, League of Legends 2019 All-Star event experienced lower viewership than in any of the past three years, and the community isn’t too happy with how the event went this year.

All-Star 2019 lagged behind its predecessors in almost every aspect. There were fewer hours streamed from the event, the total hours watch experienced a large drop, and peak viewership was down. The community pointed out a few reasons for this year’s lacking broadcast.

All-Star 2018 had almost twice the viewers of the 2019 event

In 2018, All-Stars peaked at almost 600,000 viewers and League fans enjoyed watching the event for over 6.5 million hours in total. The situation this year is quite different. All-Star 2019 peaked at just below 300,000 viewers, while fans watched a total of 2.8 million hours.

These are the lowest results Riot Games experienced with an All-Star event in the past four years. In fact, none of the three previous events had less than 400,000 peaked viewers, let alone lower than 300,000. This is probably a result of a number of changes Riot implemented to All-Stars, including a Teamfight Tactics tournament, more content creators being invited, and influencers from around the industry being invited over top pro players.

League fans unhappy with focus on TFT

League of Legends’ community was quick to share why it wasn’t in their best interest to follow All-Star this year as passionately as they have done during the previous years.

While All-Star was established as an event for pro players to have fun and relax by playing friendly tournaments at the end of the season, Riot started inviting lesser known content creators and other influencers to participate at the event mixed in with the pros. The initial idea was likely promoting those personalities and helping them to grow, but it didn’t stick with the community, and it felt like there were too many “unknowns” on the stage to steal away their attention.

Some personalities have greatly benefited the event, such as the inclusion of streamer Tyler “Tyler1” Steinkamp. But the emphasis on inviting more and more content creators with only two fan-voted pros attending from each region appears to have rubbed fans the wrong way.

Switching from the two-on-two League of Legends charity tournament to the Teamfight Tactics event also hasn’t been well received. Players do enjoy the game mode itself, but many of them don’t have as much fun watching it. With TFT taking a big chunk of screen time away from League, fans had less interest in following what’s happening at the event.

Fans also shared they were barely aware of the event happening as Riot hasn’t put much effort into marketing and promoting it beforehand.

Syed Mujtaba Naqvi

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