The partnership era of VALORANT is off to a hot start, and the culmination of its inaugural kickoff tournament has already become the second-most-watched match in the game’s early history.
During map two of the VCT LOCK//IN grand final between Fnatic and Brazilian crowd favorites LOUD, the match has already reached a peak viewership of at least 1.156 million viewers, well above the event’s previous match peak of 883K set by NRG vs. LOUD at the end of the Alpha bracket. This makes the Fnatic vs. LOUD the second-most-viewed match ever in the history of VALORANT, per Esports Charts.
There’s still some time before the end of the match for that number to grow, but overhauling the record holder would take quite the sea change. The grand finals of VCT Champions 2022, when LOUD claimed victory over OpTic in Istanbul, stands tall at just over 1.5 million peak viewers.
The list of matches that have eclipsed one million peak viewers continues to grow, with the LOUD vs. Fnatic final at VCT LOCK//IN becoming the seventh to do so. Only Champions 2022 and 2021 have featured two different matches in one tournament that separately made it past this milestone.
It’s the third time that LOUD has been in a match with over one million peak viewers, with the Brazilian side becoming one of the most-watched VALORANT teams of all time, despite not entering the esport until the start of 2022. It’s Fnatic’s second time in a million-viewer match, but the third time for Timofey “Chronicle” Khromov, who did so twice at Champions 2021 with Gambit.
