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Is Dota 2 Dying? A Comparison Between TI11 and TI10 Viewership
Because of the decrease in prize pools that Dota 2 experienced this year, many have started to wonder about the state of the game: is Dota 2 healthy? Or is it dying?
Dota 2 is certainly not dying. In fact, quite recently, we’ve seen the key numbers grow significantly. Right now, the game has 514.000 average concurrent players. This is the best number for this metric in the last five years! It’s not clear why, but over the last 30 days, Dota 2 has experienced a growth of 12.8%.
The International 10 Stats and Comparisons
In 2021, The International 10 was watched by millions of fans around the world. It’s estimated that nearly a third of the Dota 2 community tuned in to see the tournament, even though it was held in an empty stadium and the atmosphere was below average.
The Grand Final was watched, at its peak, by 2.74 million people. That’s more than 50% of the peak number of viewers for the Worlds 2022 Grand Final, and LoL has around 15 times more players than Dota 2! This shows you just how much the Dota 2 community loves this game.
For the sake of comparison, let’s take another important esports tournament: IEM Rio Major, which ended last week. The number of average viewers was 548.000, while The International 10 had 857.000. And CS:GO’s community is twice as big as that of Dota 2.
The action generated by Dota 2 is captivating and many of the game’s players have expressed their conviction that Dota 2 is the best esport in the world. Given its complexity and similarities to traditional sports like MMA, that’s probably true. In any case, no other esport gets the attention of such a large percentage of its community.
One of the things that made The International 10 such a captivating esports event was the prize pool. The tournament offered $40 million, which is an enormous amount for a game of Dota 2’s size.
The International 11
For The International 11, the numbers were considerably lower. The prize pool was around $19 million and the number of average viewers was 563.000. At its peak, the Grand Final was watched by 1.75 million people.
The reasons for this semi-failure registered by Valve are not that hard to understand. The Battle Pass was underwhelming and poorly designed in every possible way. So people didn’t want to invest as much as they did the previous year.
The tournament was held in Singapore, which meant that the European audience had no way of watching at least half of the action. Not without waking up at an unreasonable hour like 5 AM.
These two problems resulted in much lower viewership numbers than last year. However, the game itself is very healthy right now and it is believed that The International 11 actually made enough of a splash in Asia to create the massive growth we’ve seen in recent weeks.
If Dota 2 could retain its new wave of players and maybe attract a few more million, its survival is guaranteed for a long time to come. The game has already been around for a decade and during this time it has proved its resilience.
Header: Valve Corporation
