Valorant
APAC Stage 2 Finals
peak rating: 8,000 views
CS2
Semi Finals from Blast Open
peak rating from ohnepixel alone : 120,000 views
So is a Valorant dying? Yes
Valorant vs CS2 viewership
posted in
Valorant Discussion
it's almost as if people naturally see regional leagues as a glorifired qualifier and hence they will not be watching this said qualifier when they can watch the main event later? apples to oranges, different formats, can't just compare two events which happened at the same time. krakow/majors/cologne to masters/champs? that's a good one. not stage 2 vs S tier event
ohnepixels views alone more than entire Valorant community combined. You can't make this up, even on a big event.
Valorant viewership records all time is 400k. The last cs2 major alone had nearly 3 million. There is nothing bait about this, it's the objective truth. Barely even a fifth of the numbers. Asia region carries these numbers btw bc they are notoriously bad at every other FPS.
The last major was their highest ever peak at 2.7mill. valorant highest ever peak is 1.7 mill, as close as any of these data collation sites get, anyway
emea will not be watching apac. china might watch apac. americas can't watch apac. also doesn't apac have other options outside of twitch to watch their games?
also such viewership is precisely why riot try to go to the ''everything is a tournament'' format for 2027
and it's still just fucking stage 2. it is not a big lan, it is not this massive event with a huge crowd and the best teams in the world. That's like asking yourself why English FA cup gets less viewers than a Champions League game
This argument doesn’t work since Valorant viewership is past its prime while CS2 is in its peak viewership
do sites like esportscharts even account for asian streaming platforms?
I mean if we even assume they're getting accurate numbers are u not just wrong? I'm staring at 305k peak viewership with 133k avg for Pacific stage 2. Or are u talking about something else?
china has a heat index. it's not neccesarily ''viewership'', it involves some formula with chat activity, subscribers, donations, gifts, subs and all blended in it. riot pull up the numbers thru tencent I believe, but it is not open for us to see.
yeah that's kind of why I asked the question. escharts pulls from sites like soop and chzzk but they don't seem to have anything from bilibili and other Chinese streaming platforms
all of us are basically speculating about viewership. I heard during june that val had like 90-120 mil heat index combined at masters, and cs had a combined heat index of 180-200 mil. so we can just go for some sorta guess. if vct had 8.8 mil in china (cuz riot claimed 9.8 and escharts showed 1 mil), we get like 1 user = 12 units of heat. if we apply this to cs, cs got like 15-16 million. yet heat index is such an absurd mechanic it is just estimating and guessing (and even I am hestitant about the 180-200 mil heat index, just heard it during the major)
I expect the differences between both games to be no more than a couple million in peak viewership (with CS/cs2 leading given longevity). valorant seems to attract a more healthy casual/competitive player base split, so it edges cs out in daily active users/all time peaks (if we assume majority of Chinese players use steam and not some third party client). It's pretty balanced all things considered tbh. Only problem is csheads (which is an odd thing to say, just play both, not that deep) seem to think the game is irrelevant when on the more relevant success metric it's completely bigger
if we talk only about china, then ALL chinese players do not actually have steam, they have perfectworld. And, we can't refer to daily active users/all time peaks because riot and perfectworld do not provide numbers. China is a really interesting even exotic region even to me as a cs fan. They seem to absolutely love niko/donk/m0nesy, and although there are only 2-3 chinese teams who show up to S tier events (tyloo, lynn vision, rare atom), lynn vision's coach GUM actually said that china has a massive pug culture, but none want to go pro. So, apparently china has a massive cs player base, but none of them actually want to go pro
IEM Cologne Major 2026 reached a peak of 2.75 million viewers.
VCT Masters Madrid 2024 reached a peak of 1,687,848 viewers.
CS2 in 2026 is averaging 292,000 viewers compared to Valorant's 141,000.
https://escharts.com/games/valorant
https://esportsinsider.com/2026/06/counter-strike-valorant-viewership-war
https://escharts.com/news/counter-strike-vs-valorant-viewership-cs-leads-early-2026-tactical-fps-esports-metrics
holy shit you're sad, cut this pussy shit or go on over to hltv with the rest of you miserable fucks
normally when people say a game dying, they look to playercount, not shitty viewership. a declining esport scene means naught when a large playerbase is casual, there is just no longer a reason for casuals to watch the esport.
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