VSPO!, short for the Virtual Esports Project, recently held a weekend event of esports competition in collaboration with RAGE, a prominent Japanese event organizer. At the Showdown, multiple esports games were showcased and VSPO! members competed against some of Japan’s forefront esports talent: streamers, coaches, and players. The weekend was ultimately VSPO!’s most popular event in livestreaming, and also set new viewership peaks for various members of the agency.
Spanning the weekend of March 22 and 23, the VSPO! Showdown powered by Rage took place at the Ryogoku Kokgikan Sumo Hall in Tokyo, featuring five of Japan’s favourite esports. On top of the live event, it was broadcast on Twitch and YouTube, and a Japan-only pay-per-view option was also available through ABEMA PPV. Unfortunately, we cannot track viewership for ABEMA, as no statistics are publicly available.
The first day of the VSPO! Showdown 2025 began with Call of Duty, before moving onto Alliance of Valiant Arms and finishing with Street Fighter 6, while the second day was dedicated to only two titles, League of Legends and Valorant. Each of these titles saw VSPO! members face off against highly popular figures, such as Chikara “Fps_shaka” Kawakami and ZETA DIVISION’s streamer k4sen.
VSPO! Showdown powered by Rage 2025 viewership statistics & top streamers
In total, the weekend of action received 1.23M Hours Watched through the official VSPO! YouTube channel. On the opening day of the event, the Street Fighter 6 tournament received 121K Peak Viewers (PV). With over a hundred thousand viewers tuning in, VSPO! almost doubled their previous peak of 63.4K PV, which was reached almost two years ago.
Interestingly, while Street Fighter 6 was the most popular game on YouTube, the official VSPO! Twitch account earned its highest viewership by far for League of Legends on the second day. This was likely helped by a last-minute boost of advertising from participants in the League of Legends tournament, which we will take a closer look at under the top streamers section.
While the peak viewership for the official YouTube account stands at 121,000 PV, the overall event peak would be much higher than this. Not only including the official Twitch broadcast, but other Japanese streamers and VSPO! members also covered the Showdown to great success, adding to a higher cumulative total viewership.
猫汰つな / Nekota Tsuna was the most popular co-streamer of the VSPO! Showdown, having received just under 58,000 PV. She hosted a watch party including other members of her agency on the weekend’s opening day; with her taking part in the Valorant tournament on Sunday, she with other Valorant and League of Legends contestants, took up a co-streamer role for Saturday. This includes 夢野あかり (Akarin), leader of the VSPO! Valorant team for the showdown, who received 26,300 PV during the Street Fighter matches.
Of course, not only VTubers were in attendance at the Showdown. Fps_shaka was the most popular of the esports figures participating in the Showdown, having received 32,300 Peak Viewers for his practice sessions of League of Legends on March 22. Both Shaka and K4sen streamed some practice LoL games on the Saturday, with K4sen falling just out of our ranking at 23.3K PV.
While these broadcasts did not directly cover the Showdown, they alerted their viewers to the event once again at the last minute, and reminded them to tune in. Twitch viewership for the official broadcast was noticeably stronger on Sunday for the Showdown, especially for the League of Legends tournament.
Together with RAGE, VSPO! organized one of the most entertaining and exciting crossovers between livestreaming and esports so far in 2025. The elaborate weekend of esports tournaments set new records for VSPO!, and was one of their most popular event ever. Crossovers between esports and livestreaming have been a winning formula for a few years in Japan, and the VSPO! Showdown 2025 continued this legacy.
