The latest edition of ZLAN was held from April 18 to 20 at the Le Zénith Sud indoor arena in Montpellier, France. Despite some top French content creators battling each other across numerous games to decide who was the best, the livestreaming numbers were down from previous years.
ZLAN is an annual multi-gaming competition held by Adrien "Zerator" Nougaret, one of France's top Twitch streamers. It involves some of the powerhouse European nations' top content creators taking on each other across multiple games at a single venue, with the winner taking home a majority of the prize pool.
The 2025 iteration attracted 200 players, split into 100 duos, as they vied for a share of the €52,025 cash prize. A format structured to include several phases — seeding, knockout rounds, group stages, and finals — gave fans an action-packed weekend filled with intense gaming battles.
Coming to the participants and results, two-time defending champion Lockness teamed up with KennyStream, who won the 2021 edition, making it a pretty strong pairing from the get-go. However, the duo could not get its hands on the winning prize of €40,000, which was gobbled up by Nicolas "Nykho" Sturla and Théo "Cyqop" Lesecq.
Additionally, the doors were thrown open to the public for the concluding matches on the final day of this event, allowing fans to cheer their favourite streamers in person, leading to quite the spectacle at the arena.
The ZLAN 2025 hit a peak of just over 189,000 viewers during the knockout stage on Day 1. During this phase, 32 duos battled it out in titles like Chaned Together, Party Animals, and SpeedRunners, with the 16 winners advancing to the Group Stage.
This year's ZLAN had the lowest viewership numbers of any event in the series since its inception in 2019. It was the least-performing tournament by peak concurrent viewers and watch time, with the 2022 and 2021 iterations ranking first, respectively, for these metrics.
Like in 2024, a smaller number of channels co-streamed the proceedings, which was a crucial reason for the low audience reach this year. The number of creators live broadcasting the action fell from 129 last year to 81 in 2025.
Moreover, massively popular names like Corentin "Gotaga" Houssein, Pierre-Alexis "Domingo" Bizot, and Kamel "Kamet0" Kebir continued to stay away. Two of these two were busy covering the newly minted Kings League France, where Kamet0 owns Karasu and Domingo is president of FC Silmi.
ZLAN 2025 also had to compete with other renowned events from highly followed esports being played across the globe. This included top competitions in Counter-Strike, League of Legends, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and Valorant.
There was also an announcement for fans of the series towards the end of ZLAN 2025, with Zerator revealing that Ascension, another video gaming tournament that he hosts, will be back this year. So far, two iterations have been held, and 2025's event will feature PUBG, the popular battle royale shooter on PC.
Alongside unveiling a trailer for the event, Zerator revealed that he would be co-casting the action with Antoine Daniel. It will have a community prize pool, which has been open since April 20, and although the exact dates have not been disclosed, a slot for the end of the year has been mooted.
Whether the Ascension event can grow in terms of audience reach remains to be seen, but ZLAN remains one of the top content creator-led events on the annual French livestreaming calendar. The presence of some of the nation's top influencers is a testament to that, and if the likes of Gotaga and Kamet0 were to participate or co-cast the action, there is no doubt that the viewership numbers would skyrocket enough to challenge any other similar tournament from the year across the world.
It also furthered the notion that such tournaments could very well dominate the future of livestreaming, perhaps even esports competitions, where a part of the proceedings are dedicated to streamer battles. It's an interesting time to be a fan of the segment, and with a lot more influencer-heavy events coming up, we could see some high viewership numbers.
