| About 2.2 million Chinese viewers flocked to watch the final of ‘2022 LCK Summer’ held last month. It’s the second highest on record. The photo shows the crowd at the Gangneung Arena stadium at the time. [라이엇 게임즈 제공] |
[헤럴드경제=김민지 기자] “2.2 million Chinese flocked to see Korean players… China is more uproar than us, what is it?”
It was found that 2.2 million Chinese people flocked to watch the Korean Pro League final of the game ‘League of Legends (LoL)’ held last month. It’s the second highest on record. Even though it was a match between Korean clubs, the number of Chinese viewers was nearly three times higher than that of Koreans. It has proven its solid status as an ‘e-sports country’ with a pro gamer ‘Faker (real name Lee Sang-hyeok)’ called a LoL legend.
‘League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK)’, which hosts the LOL Korean professional league, announced on the 27th that this year’s LCK average number of viewers per minute (AMA) was about 381,000. This is an increase of 17% from the previous year, which recorded about 326,000 people. AMA means the average number of viewers watched from the start to the end of a set of LCK matches.
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| Crowds gathered at the ‘2022 LCK Summer Finals’ held at Gangneung Arena last month [라이엇 게임즈 제공] |
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| ‘2022 LCK Summer Final’ Fan Festa held at Gangneung Arena last month [라이엇 게임즈 제공] |
In the final, the attention of users from all over the world was focused. On the 28th of last month, the summer final between the clubs ‘Gen.G’ and ‘T1’, held at Gangneung Arena, attracted up to 3.7 million simultaneous viewers.
In particular, Chinese viewers accounted for the majority. Chinese viewers accounted for 60% of the total concurrent viewers. That’s 2.2 million people. Korean viewers followed with 900,000 (25%), followed by English and Vietnamese with 300,000 (9%) and 200,000 (6%), respectively. This means that 2.5 times as many Chinese users as Korean viewers flocked to the Korean professional league.
Chinese people’s love for Korean e-sports matches is steady. The last spring final attracted 5.17 million simultaneous viewers, the highest record in LCK history. Of these, 3.4 million were Chinese viewers, accounting for a whopping 66%. At that time, the proportion of Korean viewers was 20%, more than three times the difference.
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| The LCK Finals held at KINTEX in Ilsan in 2012 [LCK 제공] |
Both the spring and summer finals were between ‘Gen.G’ and ‘T1’. T1, a subsidiary of SK Square, is an e-sports company that was created as a joint venture with the entertainment company Comcast. It has an affiliated LoL professional game team and has Gamer Faker, who is called an industry legend, as a player. Gen.G is a professional gaming team run by Taiwanese-American Kevin Chu, co-founder of Kabam, a global mobile game company. Gen.G won the spring championship and T1 won the summer championship.
Meanwhile, the ‘2022 LoL World Championship’, also called ‘Worlds Cup’, will be held from the 29th to the 5th of November. A total of four teams will participate as representatives of Korea, the ‘superior country of e-sports’: Gen.G, T1, Damwon Kia, and DRX. Korea lost the Worlds title to China last year. It is noteworthy whether or not he will recover his self-esteem this year.