Recently, Team Whales achieved a feat that can be described as “shocking” the entire League of Legends (LoL) community worldwide, not just VCS. For the first time, a team from the VCS region managed to defeat a strong opponent from a Major region in a BO3 match. Notably, this was not an LCS representative – often considered the weakest among the four Major regions. Team BDS is from the LEC – known for its explosive gameplay and unconventional picks and bans, which have posed challenges even for LCK and LPL.
The match between TW and BDS has “shaken” the entire LoL community. Prior to that, the match between GAM Esports and LOUD also drew significant attention from the international LoL scene. Even notable figures in the professional LoL community, like LS and Caedrel, shared insights and analyses regarding GAM’s loss, even though their opponent was just a wildcard representative from CBLOL.
Notably, within just two days since the official start of the Play-In Stage of Worlds 2023, there were two matches that peaked over 1 million viewers. These were the encounters between GAM and LLL (1,031,013 viewers) and TW versus BDS (1,015,028 viewers). These are also the two matches with the highest peak viewership for Worlds 2023 so far, far surpassing the third place match of Movistar R7 against PSG Talon (which only achieved 764,372 viewers).
This indicates that the VCS region is genuinely attracting a lot of attention from the international LoL community. Notably, these view counts do not include livestream platforms or co-broadcasts from the LPL region. After performances at Worlds 2022 and MSI 2023, although VCS did not achieve good results, the efforts of the players have secured a significant position for the region in the evaluations of the international audience.
However, currently, GAM’s performance has not been very good and they only have one deciding match against R7 left. This is an opponent that has previously defeated GAM at MSI 2023, and they are ready to replicate that, especially if GAM’s players continue their disappointing performances from recent times.