LoL - LTA North: FLY-C9 streamed scrims peak at 50k viewers

It's noon in Los Angeles — Cloud9's team house and FlyQuest's facility are abuzz in a last-minute preparatory scramble. Just over 24 hours earlier, plans weeks in the making had been finalized: Two of the best teams in the LTA would stream a scrim block with full communication and game review transparency.

Expectations were varied ahead of the event. Caedrel's Los Ratones had established the potential of streaming scrims but, other than Gabriël "Bwipo" Rau, none of the players had significant audiences on Twitch. There was no telling if fans would actually tune in, and stick around for hours, in the middle of the day on a Tuesday.

Many considered the very idea an affront to competitive integrity, insisting that it would only further debase the level of North American League of Legends. But, as Christopher "PapaSmithy" Smith explained in FLY's announcement video, NA LoL seized the global spotlight with FLY's series against Gen.G at Worlds. Still, LTA viewership and fandom have continued to dwindle — only radical efforts to grow fandom will pave the way forward.

With twelve primary streams (one POV stream for each player and spectator broadcasts on each team's Twitch channel) and several notable costreamers, from Christian "IWDominate" Rivera to Gustavo "Baiano" Gomes, the event cast a wide net. Thousands of viewers from four regions — Europe, NA, Brazil, and Korea — ended up tuning in. It was an undeniable success.

Though Game 2 peaked at over 50k viewers, driven in large part by FlyQuest's channel being featured on the Twitch home page and steady viewership from Bwipo, Baiano, and IWDominate, overall viewership stabilized at an impressive 30k viewers — even with European viewers heading to bed and Baiano and IWD ending their streams halfway through the series.

Despite production issues early on, for both FlyQuest and Cloud9, the viewing experience was smooth overall. Both teams are at the top of the league, and had just faced off in a stage match with a shocking upset result — in the end, FLY won 3-2, a close, high-level series overall.

Both teams took the opportunity to make content about the scrim block and highlight it on socials as much as possible — FLY has further promised to post an edited video of the scrims and the game reviews on their YouTube channel. As a pilot for the initiative, the C9-FLY streamed scrim block proved a core audience exists for this content. If it becomes a consistent fixture of the LTA space, it could be the first step to saving North American League of Legends.