Season 2 of Arcane, the animated television series based on League of Legends, hit streaming services on November 9. The TV has reached a mainstream popularity similar to that of League of Legends itself, and according to Netflix's own data, the show reached the top of the English-language charts for the streaming service, but failed to reach the non-English charts. Interestingly, this reflects the premiere's performance on Twitch, where an international English-speaking audience made up the vast majority of the premiere's total viewership.
Streams Charts has collated viewership statistics for Twitch surrounding Arcane’s Season 2 release, including Riot Games’ own official community premiere. The premiere featured content creators from popular group OfflineTV, who were also present for the first season’s premiere. These creators added a boost from their loyal audiences to the official global community premiere’s watch time.
Most watched Arcane streamers for Season 2’s premiere
Most watched streamers of Arcane by total watch time and peak concurrent viewership
Riot Games’ official global community premiere reached 485.6K Hours Watched in under two hours, and it reached 331.8K Peak Viewers during the sneak peek given into Season 2. For comparison, the official Riot Games Twitch channel recently reached 644.1K PV for the Worlds 2024 grand final match.
Although the numbers are comparable, the true popularity of League of Legends in livestreaming still trumps Arcane. Firstly, viewership for the official Riot Games Twitch channel has been falling since co-casting was integrated to the esports broadcasting system for Worlds in 2023, allowing Arcane to catch up. Secondly, League of Legends esports viewership is highly international, and also spread across many co-streams since 2023. A significant portion of LoL esports’ audience are not represented in these official channel statistics for English-language viewers.
Read more here: Top co-casters of Worlds 2024: how co-casting helped League of Legends to set a viewership record
Behind the official RiotGames channel, TenZ and Rubius were neck-and-neck for the most popular streamers of the event. While the recently retired Valorant professional was able to reach 80.1K Hours Watched, far more than Rubius, the Spanish streamer was able to record a higher total peak viewership than the Canadian former esports player.
Generally, the top channels for the day represented popular community streamers from some of League of Legends’ largest audiences. 蝦愛橘子 (shuteye_orange) was the leading Chinese-language streamer with 38.7K Hours Watched; Taiwan is the largest Chinese-language audience on Twitch, and their passion for League of Legends was palpable throughout the recent Worlds 2024 event.
American streamer Cyplexval, along with Belarus’ relaxcis and France’s COSTACHEU, enjoyed high viewership through the event day. As is the usual case for Twitch Drops-enabled events, many smaller streamers who can dedicate time and energy of the event will benefit heavily from the coverage, and have a chance to reach personal viewership records. Other highly popular streamers to cover the event includes Brazil’s Baiano, fps_shaka from Japan, and Spain’s elxokas. A healthy mixture of streamers with millions of followers and those with fewer than 100K made up our rankings for the Season 2 premiere.
Arcane’s first global premiere on the Riot Games channel reached 636K PV, and maintained a much higher average viewership than Season 2’s global community premiere. If we turn to how Arcane was viewed overall on Twitch, a similar drop in viewership can be observed there.
Arcane Season 2 matched two-thirds of overall LoL viewership on Twitch
Arcane was heavily supported by co-streaming of the first few episodes. The show laid out an entire method for Twitch streamers to support the event, with co-streaming allowed exclusively on the purple livestreaming platform. Twitch allows streamers to disable VODs and clips, which made the platform particularly attractive for this purpose.
Streamers were allowed to co-stream the official Riot Games broadcast, and even some Twitch Drops were enabled for viewers. Twitch Drops is a long-standing method for boosting viewership of special events on Twitch, by giving viewers a unique reason to turn into broadcasts. These Drops-enabled co-streams were powerful enough to make Arcane the 10th most popular category on Twitch for the day.
On only November 9, Arcane received 1.49M Hours Watched, and reached over 2K individual streamers broadcasting with over 576.4K viewers concurrently watching Arcane on Twitch. Despite these strong numbers for the season’s release, they did mark a downturn in interest compared to season 1’s first release. However, comparing a series premiere to a season premiere may be unfair.
On Twitch, Arcane’s Season 2 premiere reached 66% of the total viewership achieved by League of Legends for the same day. This is no small feat, considering that League of Legends is usually somewhere among the top categories on the entire platform, and Arcane is spread across multiple streaming media, such as platforms like Twitch, and paid services like Netflix.
Before we take a closer look at which channels totally contribute dot the viewership of Arcane’s premiere, let’s turn our attention back to the official channels, which made up a significant portion of the overall viewership achieved by the show’s premiere.
Main English broadcast dominated official channel viewership for S2 premiere
The Season 2 premiere of Arcane was streamed by many of Riot Games’ official Twitch channels. Streamed across over 14 different channels, covering well over 10 languages, the premiere focused on a wide global audience for the new Netflix show. In total, this span of channels recorded over 42% of the total watch time for Arcane on November 9.
Despite this widespread coverage, the English-speaking RiotGames channel became the one that received over 92.5% of the total viewership for official channels. Other audiences, such as Spanish-speaking fans from Spain and Latin America, and Portuguese-speakers from Portugal and Brazil, made up a significant portion of the series premiere a few years ago, but these audiences showed a total drop off in interest.
The lack of interest from these audiences on Twitch partially is accounted for by Kick’s entry to the Latin American market. The livestreaming platform has been snapping up many of Latin America’s most popular broadcasters, as the channel is becoming a serious contender to Twitch in this region. Many of the LATAM co-streamers who ranked among the most-watched channels of the season premiere have since moved to Kick.
Other small regional channels such as those from Japan and Turkey also ranked noticeably ahead of their peers from Europe and Asia. Korean audiences are naturally absent, as Twitch exited the country recently, with the market gap since being filled by both new coming and established livestreaming platforms in the country.
Twitch Chat was more active during the emotes-only rebroadcast of the premiere
For Twitch Chat data of the official broadcasts, we have selected exclusively the main English-language RiotGames channel and divided its data across its two streams on November 9. Firstly, the highly-watched premiere broadcast which showed off the event, and 12 hours later, the shorter rebroadcast which showed off the new Season 2 Act to another audience of fans.
In terms of the Twitch Chat statistics for the most-watched official broadcast, the day of Arcane premieres accumulated 69.7K total Twitch Messages, with many of these messages using the new Arcane-inspired global Twitch emotes, which are dedicated to the television show. While the premiere broadcast was about doubly as watched as the later rebroadcast stream, the rebroadcast’s Chat was actually noticeably more active.
When it came time for the rebroadcast, fans had time to digest some of the premiere if they were returning viewers, and some users may have watched the initial premiere while on-the-go, as it began at 9am in Central European Time, and quite late for American fans of the show. The rebroadcast’s Chat recorded 14.5% more Messages per User, which may also have something to do with Riot enabling “emotes only” mode for the second stream.
“Emotes only” is used on Twitch for various reasons, including restricting spoilers and protecting information-sensitive events. Riot Games enabled this mode for the rebroadcast, and fans may have been more likely to spam emotes in Chat, rather than write text messages during the show’s premiere. The most popular emotes for the day were largely made up of the new emotes released to celebrate Season 2, which are available globally on Twitch.
Season 2 of the show certainly made a splash in the livestreaming industry. If the initial reports about the show’s Netflix viewership are true, it has also landed as one of the most popular shows of the year.
