Valorant Champions 2026 groups: a higher peak, about 11.5% fewer hours

The group stage of Valorant Champions 2026 reached a higher peak than a year earlier but was watched for fewer hours, according to figures Esports Charts published on Monday, October 5. The audience analytics firm counted a peak of 718,300 viewers, up 7.8 percent on the same stage of 2025, against 18.1 million hours watched, down about 11.5 percent.

The peak came in Group C, where Paper Rex beat G2 Esports 2-1 to win the group. The figures cover the ten match days played in Shanghai from September 24 to October 4. The tournament itself is only halfway through: the playoffs open on Wednesday, October 7, and the grand final is on October 18.

The world championship in Shanghai

Champions is the world championship of Valorant, the tactical shooter published by Riot Games, and the last event of the season of its circuit, the Valorant Champions Tour. The 2026 edition gathers sixteen teams, four from each of the circuit's leagues: Americas, EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), Pacific and China. According to Dot Esports, each league sent its top two teams of Stage 2, the last league phase of the season, and two more with the highest Championship Points, the season-long count of results kept by Riot. The outlet lists two venues, the Jing'an Sports Center and the Mercedes-Benz Arena, and a prize pool of US$2,250,000, of which US$1,000,000 goes to the winner.

Riot's guide to the event, published on September 11, sets out how the group stage works. Each of the four groups holds one team from each league. Every match is a best-of-three, a series won by the first team to take two maps, and a team is out after two losses. Esports Charts calls this a GSL format: within each group, two series wins send a team through and two losses send it home. Eight of the sixteen teams go through to a double-elimination bracket, in which a team must lose twice to be knocked out.

The groups were played over ten match days, with September 28 left dark, a day without matches in Riot's calendar. October 5 and 6 are dark days too, before the playoffs.

The numbers of the group stage

Esports Charts' release puts every headline figure next to its change on the 2025 group stage. The table gathers them.

Three terms carry the comparison. Peak viewers is the highest number of people watching at the same moment. Average viewers is the typical audience across the airtime. Hours watched is the total time all viewers spent on the broadcasts, added together. The group stage therefore drew a bigger crowd at its busiest moment than in 2025, while the audience across the rest of its matches was smaller, and so was the total.

The broadcast also spread wider. Esports Charts counted 410 unique channels, the number of separate streams carrying the matches, almost 8 percent more than at the same stage of 2025.

Kick's share of the hours

The clearest growth came from one platform. Kick, the streaming site Riot added to its broadcasts this summer, accounted for 7.7 percent of the group stage's hours watched, Esports Charts found. The platform had almost no coverage of the 2025 tournament. Its average audience rose from roughly 200 viewers to 25,000, the firm wrote.

Riot announced the change on June 26. Starting with MSI 2026, the Mid-Season Invitational of League of Legends, Kick carries live broadcasts of global and regional events of LoL Esports, Valorant and Teamfight Tactics, the publisher said. Riot described Kick as the primary platform of many esports fans, especially in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe. Streamers on Kick were offered a way into Riot's creator and partner programs across League of Legends, Valorant, Teamfight Tactics and Wild Rift, and are held to the same moderation standards as creators on other platforms. Its statement presented Kick as an addition to the platforms it already used, gave no financial terms, and promised viewers there the same drops, small in-game rewards for watching live, as elsewhere.

Two limits come with it. Riot's Kick broadcasts exclude China and Korea, the statement said, so the Shanghai host market is outside the arrangement. And the official channels Riot's Champions guide lists are its Valorant channels on Twitch and YouTube, alongside its social media accounts; the guide does not mention Kick. The guide also points viewers to Shotcall, an extension that runs beside the broadcast on Twitch, where they predict maps, rounds and clutch moments for points on a global leaderboard, and to drops, including a special title, earned by watching live.

Riot was not the first large organizer to make the move this year. ESL announced on April 14 that its ESL Pro Tour in Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 would be broadcast on Kick from IEM Rio, with its other distribution platforms kept, and made Kick the exclusive home of the ESL Challenger League, its competition for rising Counter-Strike teams. Neither organizer published financial terms.

Co-streamers, in and out

Esports Charts ties two of the changes to people who do not play. Both are co-streamers, creators allowed to show the official broadcast live on their own channels, with their own commentary.

The largest absence was tarik, one of the leading community casters of Valorant Champions 2025. He did not stream the 2026 group stage, and Esports Charts links the decline in hours to his absence. GOFNS drew a slightly larger audience than a year earlier, the firm wrote, but not enough to make up for the drop.

French went the other way. French-language broadcasts roughly doubled their average viewers compared with the 2025 group stage, with Kameto's return to coverage, according to Esports Charts. Average viewers fell in most other broadcast languages.

Earlier in the season, in its release of March 5 on the Swiss stage of Masters Santiago, the firm counted more than 582,000 peak viewers for NRG against Paper Rex and more than 8.53 million hours watched.

Who drew the audience, and who went through

Paper Rex, from the Pacific league, were behind the biggest match again. Their 2-1 win over G2 Esports decided first place in Group C; G2 Esports finished second and also qualified. In Santiago in March, Paper Rex had also played in the most watched series of the Swiss stage.

The bracket that follows has an unusual shape. All four teams from the Americas, 100 Thieves, NRG, LOUD and G2 Esports, reached the playoffs, a first in the history of Valorant Champions, Esports Charts noted. Three Pacific teams went through: Paper Rex, T1 and Nongshim RedForce. Team Vitality are the only team from EMEA left.

Set against the groups Dot Esports published on September 10, the results leave some of the season's league winners out. Group A sent through 100 Thieves and T1, ahead of JD Gaming and FUT Esports. Group B sent through LOUD and Team Vitality, ahead of Global Esports, the Pacific Stage 2 winners, and EDward Gaming. Group C went to Paper Rex and G2 Esports, with TYLOO, the China Stage 2 winners, and Team Liquid out. In Group D, NRG and Nongshim RedForce advanced, while Karmine Corp, the EMEA Stage 2 winners, and XLG Esports went home. Three of the four Stage 2 champions of the season's leagues are therefore out before the playoffs; only 100 Thieves, winners in the Americas, remain.

China had the opposite result. All four of its teams, TYLOO, JD Gaming, EDward Gaming and XLG Esports, were eliminated after finishing bottom of their groups without winning a match, the firm wrote.

What comes next

The playoff bracket opens on October 7 with two series, NRG against T1 and Paper Rex against LOUD, according to Esports Charts. On October 8, 100 Thieves meet G2 Esports and Team Vitality meet Nongshim RedForce.

Dot Esports lists the grand final as a best-of-five, a series won by the first team to take three maps. Riot's guide adds that a single tournament MVP will be named after the final, chosen by broadcast talent, co-streamers and media on impact, consistency and performance when it mattered most. Co-streamers thus have a formal role in the event beyond carrying its audience.

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