Credit: Riot Games/lolesports
League of Legends’ 
Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) isn’t your standard esports tournament. As opposed to leagues like the LoL Championship Series or LoL European Championship , the MSI is one of the game’s three annual international competitions, pitting the best performing regional teams from the Spring season against one another.
To make a more traditional sports comparison, MSI is to LoL esports what an event like the UEFA Champions League is to international club soccer. However, instead of it being the World Championship, MSI comes during the break between the Spring and Summer Splits for LoL’s top esports leagues.
In short, the event serves as a sort of mid-season benchmark that allows the best teams to see how they compare with other top teams in other international leagues. G2 Esports’ victory in the tournament was the first for a European team in an international event since 2011. Their final opponent was North America’s Team Liquid, heightening the interest for the western/Twitch audience, as opposed to China, Korea, and their respective viewing platforms.
Following the trend of consistent year-over-year growth on Twitch for the LCS and LEC, this year’s MSI — played from May 1-19 — has managed to provide growth in viewership for LoL esports channels.
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The top two most-watched LoL Twitch channels in May are Riot Games’
main English-language channel and the LoL Championship Korea’s Korean-language channel with 9M and 2.5M hours watched, respectively. Each has seen their share of hours watched increase from 8.1M and 1.7M hours watched during the course of the MSI last year from May 3-20.
It hasn’t just been hours watched though. Each channel has seen a sizeable gain in average concurrent viewership as well with Riot Games averaging 57K CCV for all coverage (up from 39K CCV last year) and the LCK Korean-language channel averaging 34K CCV (up from 22K CCV).
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The strongest viewership for the event came during the finals despite G2 Esports
sweeping Team Liquid 3-0 in a best of five. The two-hour finals broadcast only generated 395K hours watched, but it maintained an average of 201K CCV on the English-language Riot Games channel. Saturday’s semi-final action produced the most-watched session of the event with 1M hours watched over the course of around five hours, averaging 195K CCV.
In 2018, the final day of action included a six-hour broadcast that posted 689K hours watched, but that session only averaged 115K CCV. Five sessions of action this year matched or surpassed that average viewership figure.
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The growth for Riot Games’ English-language viewership has permeated throughout LoL on Twitch. For the first 20 days of May this year LoL accumulated 60.8M hours watched, up from 50.4M hours watched for the same period in 2018.
As teams go back to playing in their primary leagues like the LCK, LEC, and LCS for the upcoming Summer Split, it’s not unreasonable to expect that this continuous growth for LoL esports will carry on through the rest of the season, making the game a prime early candidate to be Twitch’s most-watched title of the year.
