The recently concluded VCT Masters Shanghai, VALORANT’s second international LAN event of its competitive season, has seen a drop in viewership compared to VCT Masters Madrid.
VCT Masters Shanghai recorded around 914,000 peak viewers and 340,000 average viewers, which is a significant drop compared to over 1.6m peak viewers from Madrid earlier in the year, according to data platform Esports Charts.
Keep Reading
VCT Masters Shanghai had around 300,000 fewer average viewers than Masters Madrid (340,000 compared to 670,000). However, there is still positive news as VCT Masters Shanghai did record slightly more peak viewers than Masters Tokyo 2023, which had 830,000 peak viewers and took place at a similar time to this year’s event. The Tokyo event also had around 338,000 average viewers, very close to the Shanghai tournament.
VCT Masters Shanghai is currently the eighth most-watched VALORANT event in history, behind Masters Reykjavik, VCT Champions 2021, 2022 and 2023 and Masters Madrid, the most-watched VALORANT event ever.
It is important to note that Chinese viewership is not recorded by Esports Charts, which is even more significant this time around given that the event took place in the country.
A reason for the large decrease in viewership could be down to many popular teams failing to qualify for the event. This includes the likes of Sentinels, Loud, Karmine Corp and Gentle Mates.
Still, Gen.G and Team Heretics both managed to attract notable numbers, with the latter team being the most-watched of the tournament with 9.6m total hours watched. The eventual winners, Gen.G, attracted around 8.8m hours watched. The most-watched match of the tournament was the Grand Final between the two mentioned teams, which had a total peak of 914,131 viewers.
VCT Masters Shanghai was the second Masters event of the season. The event is the last international LAN before VCT Champions takes place in August. The upcoming Stage 2 will be extremely important for teams, as it provides direct spots at the VCT Champions.
