The Red Bull event, which sold out its venue in less than three hours, was advertised as a’showcase’ and featured a unique competitive format. T1, the League of Legends World Champions and a well-known South Korean organization, visited Germany and competed against high-profile European teams such as G2 Esports and Karmine Corp.
The tournament was held in Berlin’s Velodrom stadium in front of around 7,000 spectators. Red Bull also announced that the event would return in 2024, with the next edition slated to take place in Paris, France.
The event had an excellent viewership, with a peak of nearly 500,000 and an average of 304,000 viewers across its eight and a half hours of show time.
The Red Bull tournament drew viewership comparable to several top-tier esports championship events, possibly due to its innovative structure and the inclusion of well-known organizations.
Another recent showmatch event, KCX3: Karmine Corp vs The World, hosted in Paris in September by French organization Karmine Corp, was also a huge success. It garnered over 150,000 peak concurrent viewers online and many in-person supporters across four different esports titles in LAN showmatches.
Sergen “BrokenBlade” elik, G2 Esports’ top laner, stated, “We both took the game a little less seriously, but we still managed to win, and I’m very happy about that.” I’m envious of T1’s ability to play so many games in front of such a large crowd.”The event’s most-watched match was, strangely, not the grand final between T1 and G2, but the match between T1 and Karmine Corp, a result of both teams’ enormous and devoted fanbases.
T1 won against BIG, NNO OLD, and Karmine Corp throughout the tournament, but lost in the grand final to G2 Esports in an upset. To even the odds, T1 played each match using a different champion from a limited total pool, with the exception of the final.
