The Mid-Season Invitationals tournament hit its stride this year, and the data suggests an upward trend.
League of Legends esports tournament MSI 2024 reached its end this weekend. Throughout the nearly three-week-long derby, we saw huge plays and ugly losses. But amidst the ups and downs, Riot’s diehard community amounted to the highest concurrent viewer count for MSI since its 2017 start.
MSI 2024 concluded with the explosive Grand Final between LCK powerhouse Gen.G and Chinese reps Bilibili Gaming. The best-of-five denied all expectations as the Korean seed broke China’s win streak; a well-earned victory given GEN’s utter dominance in domestic tournaments.
In this article, we’re looking at how MSI 2024’s culmination — and everything that led up to it — gave us the biggest mid-year celebration in League of Legends history.
MSI 2024 Breaks Record for Most Concurrent Views
A New Hope
For the first time in LoL esports history, the winner of MSI this year would be guaranteed a spot at Worlds, Riot’s largest championship of the year.
The changes were announced early this year, priming the LPL, LCK, LCS, PCS and CBLOL, LLA, VCS and LEC for a banger mid-season invitational. While the results were expected, the views reflected the hype MSI 2024 garnered.
In a post, Esports Charts listed peak viewership for the past seven invitationals. And the numbers show that MSI 2024 did something right.
Mid-Season Invitational comparison by Peak Viewers:#MSI2024 – 2.8M (🆕 record)#MSI2023 – 2.3M#MS2022 – 2.2M#MSI2021 – 1.8M#MSI2019 – 1.7M#MSI2018 – 993K#MSI2017 – 916K
Stats excl. Chinese streaming platforms.
Detailed statistics of events 👇https://t.co/6NiF2Beplx
— Esports Charts 🇺🇦 (@EsportsCharts) May 19, 2024
MSI 2024 had 500,000 more views than last year’s and more than twice the peak viewers of the inaugural Invitational, making it the most popular MSI ever.
It’s worth noting that this only accounted for eyeballs that were on streaming sites like Twitch and YouTube, which means that the actual number (if you account for Chinese streaming sites) is probably higher than what we have.
Struggling Legends
The start of MSI 2024 was extremely controversial.
For starters, it was the first time in recent memory that we saw T1 — Korea’s poster child for LoL esports excellence — in Stage A Play-ins, a category reserved for teams punching up to the season’s most dominant teams.
As expected, T1 finished strong to perform in the upper brackets. They hit the ground running against teams like G2 Esports and Team Liquid. But a fateful Silver Scrapes against semifinalist BLG eliminated the LCK legends from MSI 2024.
This felt reminiscent of Fnatic’s unexpected fall in their domestic court back in Winter 2023. The once-legendary EU org floundered in the early stages, and couldn’t get into Groups for the first time in Fnatic’s history.
Humanoid and co. have risen to better heights since then, pinching a runner-up spot in the Season Finals, getting multiple deep runs in 2024, and eventually showing up at MSI 2024.
Whether you were a T1 fan or not, you couldn’t take your eyes off the screen, especially when you saw Faker making mistakes.
The once-untouchable reigning champs committed some avoidable blunders in their MSI run; mistakes which star player Lee “Faker” Sang-Hyeok blamed on a lack of proper practice due to continuous DDoS attacks against T1. While T1 eventually picked themselves back up, it was rare to watch gods bleed.
Hungry Underdogs
Despite their losses, these “David vs. Goliath” match-ups still had hyped moments that almost upset the entire bracket!
Fnatic vs Top Esports (Play-Ins Stage)
The first stage of MSI 2024 pitted Fnatic’s boys against China’s 2nd seed, and despite the skill gap, Humanoid’s squad still took the fights wherever they could, picking the better fights until they reached a series point.
Top Esports vs Gen.G (Bracket Stage)
Early in the main stage, LPL #2 seed Top Esports went up against Korean titans Gen.G, a team known for being T1’s Waterloo in domestic tournaments. That said, not only did they find some big wins, but they brawled for the full best-of-five series in the most unexpected Silver Scrapes of the entire championship.
G2 Esports vs T1 (Bracket Stage)
We almost saw the biggest upset in five years when Caps and co. went toe-to-toe against the Unkillable Demon King’s squad.
G2 Esports looked the strongest they have ever been, evoking 2019 memories of EU supremacy. And it all looked like it would go their way until the fifth and final Silver Scrapes match, when Zeus and Faker devastated the Rift with their impenetrable armor for a T1 win.
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