Every year top streamer Adrien ZeratoR Nougaret hosts ZLAN, an event for French content creators who compete against each other in various casual (and sometimes esports) games to determine the strongest. The 2023 event ended last Sunday and gathered thousands of live viewers like all previous ZLAN marathons. The competition did not reach record figures, but it still showed extremely convincing spectator statistics, especially considering several popular creators did not cast the event this year.
Unlike previous events in the series, the current one was held in a new format. Earlier the participants were divided into teams of several participants, and now all matches were played solo. In total, 200 players took part in the event; they competed in a variety of games, including Trackmania, Minecraft, Valorant and others. Interestingly, a competition in Fall Guys was also planned, but in the end, it did not take place due to problems with the game servers. Jus as the last three events of the series, ZLAN 2023 was held in Lyon.
Amateur Lockness06 became the winner of the competition. In the final, he defeated Oslo, who was the champion of ZLAN 2022 in a trio with Shuh and Leaf. Interestingly, Lockness06 went through a much longer and more difficult path at the tournament than many other participants. As you know, direct invites to ZLAN are received by streamers with an established audience, but those who do not yet have (or few) fans have to go through qualifications — Lockness06 is just one of them.
ZeratoR gathered the largest audience among broadcast channels
ZLAN 2023 has been a huge success with the audience, reaching 264.4K live viewers at its peak. As was the case at the last event of the series, the peak was reached on the first gaming day, which is logical: after all, it is at the start that the tournament is covered by the largest number of streamers. The average audience of the event, which lasted three days, was 148.1K people, and in total viewers generated more than 4.8 million watch hours.
The competition was covered on 150+ Twitch channels (!), and the organizer of the event, as expected, became the most popular: at the peak, the broadcast of ZeratoR attracted over 158K live viewers. According to the maximum one-time audience, he greatly bypassed all the closest pursuers. Sardoche, who became the second by metric, gathered a five times smaller audience (32K Peak Viewers).
ZLAN set no new records in 2023
Despite the huge number of streaming channels, ZLAN 2023 failed to set a new series record for any of the key metrics. ZLAN 2022 (315K Peak Viewers & 185K Average Viewers) remains the record event of the series by concurrent viewership, while the 2021 competition takes the first place in terms of total viewing time (it collected over 5.5 million Hours Watched).
In general, there was a bit less excitement around the event this year, which is quite understandable, since ZLAN takes place at the same time as top esports tournaments, including BLAST.tv CS:GO Major, which is hosted in Paris.
In addition, some top streamers, who were an important factor in the viewership success of last year's tournament, did not take part in the coverage of the event this year. Among others, we can mention Gotaga and Ponce, who together collected 20% of the total viewing time of the last event of the series.
All in all, ZLAN 2023 can be called another successful undertaking by ZeratoR. At the end of the event, the content creator also announced new competitions. Firstly, ZLAN 2024 has been confirmed, and also the Ascension tournament series, which will be held in different games each year. Competitions will be held in June, July, and October at Trackmania.
