Posts about North America
After reading the recent thread regarding the situation with the LCS and NA LoL as a whole, I've noticed that there are a lot of people who believe that the LoL playerbase in NA has been in a catastrophic freefall for the past few years. In reality, this is actually not true.
In a recent interview with an LPL caster, outgoing CEO Nicolo was asked whether League was dying, and his answer was that the only region with a declining playerbase is China (16:55). In fact, if you look at the amount of ranked accounts per season in NA over the past years it has remained very consistent. People in NA aren't playing League less, they're just not watching the LCS anymore. It really is that simple. Years of organizations making no content, horrible international performances, and mediocre production (production this year has been killing it though) have hemorrhaged the league's viewership.
But if you look at international events like Worlds, English language viewership is always very high. Of course, English is a language spoken by people in many many different countries, and many people especially in Europe will watch the English language broadcast over their own language, so it's hard to say exactly how many of those people are watching from NA. However, if we compare English language viewership between Worlds 2021 and Worlds 2022, then we can see the difference.
Worlds 2021 was hosted in Europe, a timezone that is very friendly to English-broadcast watching Europeans as well as viewers in Asia who watch the English broadcast. The English language broadcast for this event peaked at just under 1.2 million viewers.
Worlds 2022 was hosted in North America, a timezone that is only really favourable for those living in the Americas (hence the total drop in viewership for the event). The Worlds 2022 English broadcast peaked at just over 1.6 million viewers. This figure remained consistent throughout the finals broadcast even during the middle of the night in EU and early morning in Asia. We can reasonably infer from that that a large proportion of those viewers are watching from North America, and even if it's just half of that 1.6 million, that figure still eclipses the 460k English language viewers that Valorant Champions 2022 peaked at.
Hopefully these numbers can really put into perspective what the real issue in North America is. People aren't playing less League of Legends, the core product that the LCS offers has just been abysmal for far too long now and the current economic issues plaguing the esports scene are exposing long-running issues that have been swept under the rug for far too long. NA League isn't dying, the LCS is.
