On August 18th, Ludwig took to Twitter to announce the “worlds biggest Valorant crew battle”. A crew battle is something Ludwig has drawn from his Smash heritage but the event promised to feature top Valorant professionals and content creators, adding a Valorant twist to the idea. Ludwig and Offbrand Studios continued to add some flavour to the event by announcing the brew battles.
WORLDS BIGGEST VALORANT CREW BATTLE pic.twitter.com/hgadZLFhQE
— ludwig (@LudwigAhgren) August 18, 2023
Ludwig is no newcomer when it comes to combining alcohol and gaming. The streamer is known for bringing Beerio Kart into the limelight, where players must finish a beer before crossing the finish line of a Mario Kart race. In terms of event organisation, Ludwig used the help of Offbrand Studios to produce and run this event.
Offbrand is a creative agency and content studio co-founded by Ludwig, and earlier this year, Offbrand hired ex-Beyond the Summit staff and put them in charge of event production. It was clear at Ludwig’s Brew Battles that the live-stream production had that intimate yet polished look and feel we’ve come to expect from previous Beyond the Summit events.
Ludwig’s Beer Battles viewership statistics
Sadly, when it comes to viewership for the event, it received only slightly better-than-average viewership compared to Ludwig’s average streams. His highest recorded Peak Viewers figure for the last 30 days was his stream of him playing Who Wants to be a Millionaire, which reached 33.5K concurrent viewers at peak.
Over the last 30 days, multiple of Ludwig’s streams have broken the 20K Peak Viewers barrier, including his coverage of PogChamps 5. With these streams in mind, it’s all the more disappointing that the Brew Battles wasn’t able to reach the same heights.
In terms of watch time and average number of viewers throughout the broadcast, the Brew Battles performed decently. Ludwig’s crew battle event drew in 107.3K Hours Watched; however, it also was the longest stream of his for the last 30 days by an hour. Ludwig’s average stream time over the last month was just under four hours, so it’s no surprise that this particular statistic may be inflated.
Average Viewers shows a more modest improvement on his average, with 14.9K average concurrent viewers throughout the stream marking a 22.3% increase from his 30-day average. On a positive note for Ludwig, the Average Viewers figure does show good engagement from his chat. Ludwig was able to keep this Average Viewers figure high, even throughout the more than 7 hours duration of the broadcast.
I lost a bet… pic.twitter.com/JsK2ctFQt3
— ludwig (@LudwigAhgren) August 23, 2023
Ludwig at the Brew Battles event in Offside Studios, Los Angeles.
The specific timing of the event was also of interest, as it was scheduled to be hosted in a three-day scheduling gap of the Valorant Champions 2023 event, which will resume at 21 CEST on the 24th of August for the Upper Bracket Final. This decision is of advantage for two main reasons: firstly, to make sure the professional players are free from obligations to attend Ludwig’s event, and secondly, to utilise the hype for the discipline at the moment.
If Ludwig was trying to capitalise on Valorant Champions to boost viewership, he picked a bad year for it. If you want an in-depth look at viewership statistics for the Group Stage of the tournament, look here, but in summary, the ultimate event of the year for Valorant has experienced a drop in viewership compared to the 2022 iteration. With viewership on a low for the largest event of the year in Valorant, it may just be that interest in the discipline is temporarily ebbing.
Ultimately, Ludwig and Offbrand put a lot of time and effort into this production, but it was unsuccessful in achieving virality. It’s hard to say exactly why the viewership of the event was disproportionate to the effort in producing and streaming it, but it might include multiple factors, such as the announcement of the event coming only 5 days before, the event being exclusively broadcast on Ludwig’s channel, and a late start for some timezones — Ludwig went live at 2 AM in CEST.
The event may still be useful in terms of content, depending on whether Ludwig uploads a YouTube video and uses the event as a source of YouTube Shorts and so on. In the end, it's a sad sign when an event that has so much effort put into it fails to reach a larger audience, but Offside Studios will continue to collaborate with Ludwig and create more wondrous live-streaming experiences in the future.
