ESL One Malaysia 2022 final recap

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August 28th marked the end of ESL One Malaysia 2022, the last large offline Dota 2 tournament before the regional qualifiers for The International 2022. The Esports Charts team provides an overview of the event.

ESL One Malaysia 2022 was attended by twelve teams from Europe, China, Southeast Asia, as well as North and South America, which competed for a prize pool of $400K. Matches were held at the Arena of Stars in Genting Highlands. It should be noted that several teams had to play with stand-ins: OG, Fnatic, Alliance, and Nigma Galaxy could not field full-fledged rosters due to some players experiencing problems with health and visas.

Tournament results

  OG lifting trophy | Photo: ESL   

In the group stage, the participants of ESL One Malaysia 2022 were divided into two groups, where they played a series of round-robin matches. The two weakest teams from each group left the tournament: Talon Esports, Alliance, BOOM Esports, and Team Liquid. The best teams advanced to the upper bracket: Team Aster, Team Secret, OG, and Fnatic. All the rest went to the lower bracket: Entity Gaming, Thunder Awaken, Nigma Galaxy, and TSM.

Team Aster and OG were the best teams in the playoffs. On the way to the finals, the Chinese team confidently made it through the upper bracket, beating Fnatic and Team Secret. The situation was more complicated for OG: the team lost to Team Secret in the first round and fell into the lower bracket, where they eliminated Thunder Awaken, Fnatic, and Team Secret (in that order). In the decisive match, OG defeated Team Aster with a score of 3:0 and earned $175K. Its opponent received $85K.

Viewership statistics

Matches of ESL One Malaysia 2022 have generated a total of 9.6M Hours Watched. The event gathered 154K Average Viewers as well as just over 362.7K Peak Viewers. The most popular match was the grand final between OG and Team Aster. In turn, OG became the tournament’s most watched team. Its matches generated 4.81M Hours Watched. Coming second by this indicator (being twice behind the leader) is Team Secret. It is important to note that OG played more matches than any other team in the tournament. For example, OG played fourteen maps in the playoffs, while Team Aster played only eight.

English became the main language of broadcasts on ESL One Malaysia and gathered 204.6K Peak Viewers. Russian became the second most popular with 90.2K Peak Viewers. The top 5 by this indicator also includes Spanish (39.3K), Filipino (28.2K), and Indonesian (27.5K). Twitch became the most popular platform for watching matches, gathering 270K Peak Viewers. Streams on YouTube and Facebook Gaming gathered 77.7K and 31.2K Peak Viewers, respectively.

The most popular broadcast channels at ESL One Malaysia 2022 were the official English channels esl_dota2 and esl_dota2b from the organizers. They attracted 154.6K and 42.1K Peak Viewers, respectively. The third most popular channel was the Russian-language dota2mc from the Maincast studio, which attracted more than 41.8K Peak Viewers.

Speaking of community casters, the most popular was Admiral Morph from Thailand: his YouTube stream gathered over 34K Peak Viewers. The channel of the Russian streamer just_ns took the second spot in the overall list by Hours Watched, generating 790K HW.

Comparison with other tournaments in Southeast Asia

Most popular Dota 2 tournaments held in SEA   

When compared to the other large (non-Major) tournaments held in SEA, ESL One Malaysia shows the best result by all metrics. It was almost twice ahead of ONE Esports Dota 2 World Pro Invitational held in Singapore by Hours Watched, as well as surpassed the nearest pursuer (The Manila Masters 2017) by more than 100K Peak Viewers. There’s also a big gap from the previous leader by Average Viewers: 154.2K viewers against 92K for ESL One Genting 2017.

We also note that ESL One Malaysia has become one of the longest tournaments in the region, not counting the majors. Broadcasts of all matches lasted more than 62 hours. The closest by this indicator is ONE Esports Dota 2 World Pro Invitational Singapore with its 57 hours of airtime.

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Regional qualifiers for The International 2022 will be held in Europe, the CIS, Southeast Asia, China, and North and South America on September 3-17. The World Cup matches will be held on October 15-30 in Singapore. As usual, the teams will play the group stage at the hotel. The playoff matches will be hosted by SunTec Singapore, while the grand final will take place at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. The prize pool of the tournament will start at $1.6M and will be further increased through the sale of compendiums.