MSI 2025 Viewership Drops Behind 2024 Ahead of Final Week | Esports Charts

Six teams remain in contention for the Mid-Season Invitational 2025 title, with the final week set to deliver the tournament’s most decisive matchups. While this year’s edition of the international League of Legends event is attracting a strong audience, it still falls noticeably short of last year’s record-breaking numbers. Despite broader coverage and a format designed to better engage viewers, audience figures have dipped across nearly all major demographics.

Both LEC teams, G2 Esports and KOI, exited the title race following last weekend’s matches. Meanwhile, the LCK representatives stepped up in dominant fashion: Gen.G had to grind out a hard-fought 3:2 win over Anyone’s Legend, while reigning world champions T1 made quick work of Bilibili Gaming with a clean 3:0 sweep.

As is often the case with T1 games, their match set a new peak viewership milestone for the tournament, hitting 1.8 million concurrent viewers. Attention now shifts to an all-LCK showdown, where these two regional powerhouses will battle for a spot in the grand final.

While viewership for MSI 2025 has been climbing steadily from stage to stage, the tournament’s overall momentum hasn’t matched the explosive growth seen last year. Even setting aside the shortened Play-In stage, which featured fewer teams this time, the playoffs still fall short of MSI 2024 in terms of audience numbers, and there are two key reasons why.

At this point, average viewership is down by about 7-8% compared to last year’s tournament at the same stage. The sharper decline, however, is in peak viewership, which has dropped by 27%. So far, no matchup has sparked the kind of buzz generated by last year’s blockbuster clash between T1 and G2 Esports in the opening round of playoffs.

So what’s driving the lower numbers this time? One major factor is the absence of certain fan-favorite teams in the knockout stage, the kind that typically fuel viewership spikes. In 2024, that included the likes of Team Liquid and Fnatic. This year, while FlyQuest deserves credit for its achievements, it doesn’t generate the same level of broad audience interest across North America as a brand like TL, at least for now.

The stats above reveal a clear trend: nearly all major audience demographics have seen a drop in engagement compared to last year. The one notable exception is Spanish-language streams. The driving force behind this surge is KOI, a team backed by a massive Spanish-speaking fanbase that follows the broadcasts of Ibai “Ibai” Llanos, one of the world’s top streamers and the team’s co-owner, who covered KOI’s MSI campaign extensively.

It’ll be interesting to see whether viewership trends shift in the days ahead. MSI picks back up today with an elimination match between Anyone’s Legend and Taiwan’s hopefuls, CTBC Flying Oyster. Tomorrow, Bilibili Gaming faces off against North America’s last hope, FlyQuest. And on the following day, we get a true clash of titans: the reigning MSI champions take on the reigning Worlds champions, Gen.G vs. T1.

Last year’s tournament hit its peak (and set a new all-time MSI viewership record) during T1’s lower bracket final. This time, Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok and his squad have a shot at making the grand final through the winners’ bracket. So even if this year’s numbers have been more modest so far, there’s still a chance MSI 2025 sets a new viewership milestone.

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