First Stand 2026 saw a dramatic increase in viewership compared to the previous year of the League of Legends esports tournament.
Just the second iteration of the event, Riot Games tweaked the format to only contain best-of-fives and scrapped the best-of-ones format.
This resulted in an extra five hours of view time, and would have been more if not for all the 3-0 results, and led to a huge increase in hours watched, up to 24.6m hours compared to 2025’s 18m according to Esports Charts.
G2 Gives LoL First Stand A Boost
However, the really impressive increase was in peak audience as the final between G2 Esports and Bilibili Gaming attracted over 1.5m viewers, a near 400k more than the previous year’s final.
This was almost certainly helped by G2’s impressive run. The LEC Champions miraculously swept both LCK representatives, BNK FearX and Gen.G, 3-0 in massively surprising results.
The win over BFX was an LEC team’s first best-of-five victory over a Korean team in almost six years.
And the latter was Gen.G’s first defeat of the year; they had only dropped two games in 2026 yet G2 dominated them three games in a row without ever falling behind in gold.
G2’s First Stand heroics have LEC fans dreaming again, and their surprising form almost certainly caused more fans to tune into the final to see how they fared. It’s why G2 was the most popular team at the tournament with an average concurrent audience of 789.1k.
Meanwhile, the average audience for First Stand overall was 604.4k, a slight increase from 2025’s average of 509k.
The tournament also saw a significant increase in Portuguese-speaking viewers, largely due to the event being held in Brazil and the participation of CBLoL champions LOUD.
Though many were disappointed that Brazil was given such a small venue after a long wait for another LoL esports event.
Did you enjoy watching First Stand? Is there anything you’d like to see changed to have it stand out more from other tournaments? Let us know on the Insider Gaming Discord.
Especially now that Riot has announced big changes to LoL MSI and Worlds 2026.
