The International 2022 Group Stage: the Lowest Viewership in Several Years

The International 2022 Group Stage ended on October 18, with the four teams dropping out of the tournament. The event showed the worst start in the last few years in terms of statistics and ranked far behind TI10 and TI9 by viewership. In a new article, Esports Charts sums up the interim results of TI11.

Group Stage Results

Soniqs and BetBoom Team from Group A and Talon Esports and TSM from Group B did not qualify for TI11 playoffs. In contrast, Evil Geniuses won 7 out of 9 matches, which was the best result of the stage. PSG.LGD, the TI10 vice-champion, which started from the defeat and several draws, managed to improve its results and qualify for the playoffs upper bracket. Team Liquid, OG, Tundra Esports, Team Secret, Thunder Awaken and Team Aster also advanced to the upper bracket.

Almost all of the RNG participants fell ill with COVID-19 during the Group Stage, after which they lost all of their remaining matches

The TI10 champion, Team Spirit, had the highest number of draws (7) and qualified only for the lower bracket of the playoffs. Royal Never Give Up, Hokori, Gaimin Gladiators, BOOM Esports, Fnatic, beastcoast and Entity will also play in the lower bracket.

Viewership Statistics

We did not take into account Chinese streaming platforms due to the unreliability of data they provide.

The TI11 Group Stage matches totaled 23 million Hours Watched and drew 443K Average Viewers. The tournament reached its Peak Viewers number of 680.9K concurrent viewers on Day 1. The T11 Group Stage saw a 19.6% and 32% drop in HW compared to the results of the similar stages of TI9 and TI10, respectively, and the PV number dropped by 18.2% and 40% as well. As for the AV number, it decreased by 25% and 38% respectively. In addition, the number of Unique Viewers of the tournament on Twitch dropped by 20% compared to that of last year.

TI10 was the anniversary tournament of the series, and because of the pandemic we had to wait two whole years for it. TI10 had a prize pool of $40 million, a record for esports., while TI11 doesn't have any of that. Moreover, matches start early in the morning in Europe, which is extremely inconvenient for watching in Western and Eastern Europe, where the main audience of competitive Dota lives.

The International 2022 has become the first championship in the series, where official broadcasts of the Group Stage were not on the traditional channels for covering the event, such as dota2ti, but on the channels of the studios, which have acquired the rights for broadcasting. At the same time, the influence of community casting grew this year, as the total contribution of official broadcasts to TI Group Stage's Hours Watched dropped from 61.3% for TI10 to 48.7% for TI11.

The most popular Group Stage channel is PGL_Dota2, which accumulated more than 15% of the stage’s total HW number. It is followed by two Russian-language coverage channels, with the Nix community caster outpacing the main betboom_ru channel. It should be noted that these three channels are also in the Top 3 by Peak Viewers and Average Viewers.

The leader by HW among languages is English, which made up 41% of the TI11 Group Stage's HW total. The contribution of Russian-language streams is 38% (2nd place), and they also rank highest by PV, attracting 337.2K concurrent viewers. The English-language broadcasts reached 290.6K PV (2nd place). At the same time, Russian surpassed English by PV over first three days of the Group Stage, and was also the leader in terms of AV on Day 2. It should be noted that the Peak Viewers number of the Ukrainian-language broadcasts audience grew tenfold compared to the TI10 results, reaching 5.7K people (10th place). Moreover, Ukrainian will be the broadcast language of Maincast studio on its Twitch channels during TI11 playoffs.

Another distinction of the TI11 Group Stage coverage from the last tournament in the series was the absence of broadcasts on SteamTV. The platform usually hosts official streams of Valve-sponsored events, but this year, the coverage of the TI Group Stage was completely outsourced, so there were no broadcasts in the player. We should note that at last year's Group Stage, SteamTV players drew 5-7K Average Viewers, and the Peak Viewers number exceeded several tens of thousands.

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TI11 Playoff matches are scheduled for October 20-22 and October 29-30 at the Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre. The championship prize pool will continue to grow until the final day: at the time of publication, it is $16.8 million, less than that of the previous five The Internationals.