LCS sees biggest split-over-split AMA growth since franchise era, up YoY for first time in four years
Hello and welcome to the 2024 Spring LCS retrospective. In this blog, we’ll dive into what we learned about this split, viewership metrics, community conversations, and our thoughts heading into Summer.
TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK
At the start of this year, I listed the reasons a fan might have stopped watching in 2023 heading into 2024. It was a long list, which included things like the departure of organizations and players, being unable to watch on weekdays, and more. Our job was simple: Try to make a bigger list of reasons to tune in. “Fans First” was a slogan we adopted for a lot of these changes, taking your thoughts and feedback into consideration.
In an extremely short window of time, the LCS incorporated new drafting workflows, live patch play, updated the stage, incorporated new content ideas, adjusted how we communicate with the community, changed the schedule, welcomed new partners, and many other changes. Some of these were already underway, many were designed and executed in a very small window to deliver for LCS fans and LoL players. The bounceback was possible because of the passionate feedback from the community and the hard work of the individuals working on the LCS.
Before we dive in, I want to give a quick shout-out to the LCS pro players and teams. We threw not only a historic number of changes at them, but ones unique to the LCS. They met all of these changes with an incredibly positive attitude and worked alongside us. The LCS intends to stay innovative, and knowing our pros can meet these changes with an open mind is commendable.
I also want to take a moment to thank everyone who worked on the LCS this split to make a headline like this possible. Engineers, Comp Ops, Tech Ops, Comms, Broadcast, Talent, Features, Partnerships, Publishing, Events, Facilities, and many others worked every single week to bring this product to life for you, the fans!
Finally, I want to thank the fans for tuning in and engaging with the LCS throughout the split. We hear you, and your feedback helps us build a better product.
Without further ado, onto the biggest talking points.
SPRING GROWTH
Year-over-Year (YoY) Average Minute Audience (AMA) is the main way most people tend to evaluate viewership growth. While a good baseline, it ignores any nuance or context across the year. Usually, AMA takes the “Full Broadcast” of LCS, meaning the pre-show and post-show numbers included. However, our broadcast is optimized for matches and breaks. In 2024, the LCS shifted from 5 to 4 games, accompanied by faster transition time between matches. This means the percentage of our show that is pre- and post-show increased in 2024, which deflates actual viewership numbers compared to past years (pre-show and post-show are roughly the AMA 1/3 and 2/3 the level of Matches AMA, respectively).
Going forward in the rest of this post, we will be talking using the term “Main Broadcast” (which is only inclusive of matches and breaks) when comparing viewership to normalize structure changes across splits.
The LCS grew YoY for Full broadcast as well, but even more so when comparing actual viewership during gameplay. Main Broadcast AMA YoY is up 10%, which is the first YoY growth since 2020 COVID Summer spike!
YoY isn’t the only way to slice the data though, that is why we also look at Split over Split (SoS). It’s no secret that 2023 Summer was a very rough split for LCS in a number of ways, which manifested in record lows for viewership. We don’t want to just compare 2024 Spring to 2023 Spring, it also needs to rebound from the previous Summer. Spring typically outperforms Summer viewership, but it is a question of “by how much?” Main Broadcast SoS AMA for Spring 2024 is the largest growth in the franchise era, both in percent viewership and raw AMA.
Safe to say, from an AMA perspective… It was a pretty good split! We take this to mean that the week over week experience for fans was a big step up. We aren’t done yet, as we want to continue LCS’ growth to previous years viewership. We’ll talk about some more viewership in a bit, but viewership is not the end-all-be-all. There is another topic which matters a ton: sentiment.
VIEWERSHIP VS SENTIMENT
Viewership is great, but if fans hated the product, we would not be satisfied. While overall sentiment for the split is quite positive, there were a few pain points that fans voiced and we don’t want to turn a blind eye to them. One in particular is the break weeks between Week 4 and Week 5.
The fact the break weeks held stable AMA numbers was a big win for us in terms of maintaining fan interest. However, fans didn’t like it, which was anticipated when planning the LCS schedule. Now that the split is done, it’s worth revisiting our initial reasoning:
- We want our league to start near game season and other regions’ start so LCS fans aren’t waiting like Squidward in that meme.
- We want pro players to be playing competitively in the lead up to MSI, and for fans to be watching that build-up.
- While we considered formats that could elongate our season, we wanted to minimize the impact to collect data on the other big changes. Any format tweaks were weighed against viewer fatigue, risk of data, and budget
- We want to avoid overlapping with VCT, especially around playoff qualifications and the playoffs themselves
The fourth reason in particular has been a bit of a sticking point for some, so I would love to elaborate a bit more. One of the first big bets we made for 2024 was simple: Being live at the “right times” is more important than the “right place.” This doesn’t mean that location and/or stage doesn’t matter, but when forced to choose between one or the other, we believe choosing the right time is the most impactful. Our primary goal was moving back to weekends, which in turn created a few weekends of overlap with VCTA.
This change came quite late in 2024’s planning when VCTA had locked almost all aspects of their show. While LCS and VCTA are two different products, the shows share many of the same staff on the backend. VCTA also has multiple live languages in-studio which makes their product a more complex one to adjust spatially and technically. As the ones shifting to cause this overlap, LCS was more than happy to pilot the new space. Fortunately, the overlap weekend went well: The LCS face-off show was enjoyable for many fans, neither VCTA nor LCS suffered technical issues, and viewership was good for both products.
When considering all the options, the break was the best option available, and with the data available now, it remains so. In a situation where sentiment is inevitably impacted, we will work to find ways to minimize pain points for our fans, pro players, and our studio team.
LCS PEAK VIEWERS DOWN AND SUMMER LOOK AHEAD
We had some big wins this split, which indicates we are on the right path, but there are always things to improve on. One area where we fell short was our Peak Concurrent Users (PCU), which was down ~20% YoY. PCU is a good measure of more casual interest in the product, and who will tune in for the big moments. While PCU was higher Week over Week than 2023 and rivaled 2022 during the regular season, PCU did not spike in the playoffs as much as it typically does. Our working thesis is that while the changes implemented this split created a watchable and refreshing broadcast for existing fans, we didn’t emphasize attracting new or lapsed fans enough.
As we look ahead to Summer, we’ll have two main initiatives. We’ll be keeping “Fans First” as a goal, continuing to iterate and innovate on the LCS in ways for existing fans to appreciate. The other will be broadly defined around “outreach” efforts to connect and market to new and churned fans. I’m sure you’d like more concrete plans around both of those, but we are saving all official Summer split plans until after MSI. Expect something similar to the Spring LCS Address video then!
Hopefully this retrospective helps give LCS fans insight and confidence in how we are thinking about 2024 for the direction of the product going forward. See you back here soon!
