The International 10 Complete Statistics — Most popular matches, teams, and biggest records

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The International 10 has become the most watched championship in the history of Dota 2 and set many records, especially among Russian-speaking spectators of esports. Esports Charts sums up the complete results of the tournament: we tell you about the most popular matches, teams, broadcast languages and how the championship's audience has grown in five years.

TI10 Overall Statistics

The TI10 grand final between PSG.LGD and Team Spirit had a Peak Viewers number of 2.7 million concurrent viewers. Only five events had a higher number: the last two League of Legends World Championships, as well as the largest competitions in mobile disciplines Free Fire, PUBG Mobile and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang.

Statistics doesn’t include numbers from Chinese streaming platforms due to its unreliability. It does include numbers from DotaTV, SteamTV and also the broadcasts of community casters (e.g., AdmiralBulldog, SingSing, etc).

In total, viewers spent more than 107 million hours watching TI10 broadcasts; the tournament ranked fourth in esports by this metric. Only the LoL World Championships in 2019-2021 had a higher number, and the current Worlds statistics will grow as the event is not over yet.

The Average Viewers of TI10 was 857.3K people, which is the eighth place among the esports tournaments. Only the events where there were more than a million viewers on average at the broadcasts ranked higher: these are League of Legends, Fortnite and Free Fire tournaments.

In the history of Dota 2, only three tournaments at their peak have had more than a million viewers - the last three The International. However, in terms of this metric, The International 10 outpaced the last tournament in the series by almost 40%, and all other championships in the discipline by over 100%.

Noteworthy, the European qualifiers for TI10 were also included in the discipline's top 10 tournaments: thousands of people tuned in to watch the games of TI9 grand finalists as OG faced Nigma (former Team Liquid squad). This qualifier is ahead of The Kuala Lumpur Major and EPICENTER Major 2019.

The International 10 became the most watched esports event in CIS by Peak Viewers with 1.2M concurrent spectators. It's two times more than the previous record in the region, which was set during TI9, when over 670K people were simultaneously watching the Grand Final at the Russian-speaking broadcast.

Six Dota 2 events and three CS:GO tournaments entered the top 10 events in CIS. It's noteworthy, that fifth place belongs to PUBG Mobile international championship, which got that many viewers thanks to the in-game broadcasts.

The most popular matches of the tournament

At the beginning of the tournament, the most popular TI10 matches were OG ones, but during the playoffs Team Spirit got the initiative. The further the team progressed in the losers pool, the more active the spectators followed its matches.

Team Spirit's last three games at The International 10 were among the top 5 most popular matches in Dota 2 history. At the same time, Spirit's game with Team Secret even surpassed the 2019 lower bracket final, where Team Liquid beat PSG.LGD.

It should be noted that the last Grand Final, where OG defeated Liquid, had only 300K more Peak Viewers than the decisive match of 2018. And the TI10 Grand Final’s Peak Viewers number increased by more than 773K spectators compared to the last championship series.

Four out of five most watched TI10 games among CIS viewers also became the most popular ones in the entire history of Dota 2 by Russian language. The only match from other TI entered top 5 as third place went to TI9 grand finals, when OG faced Team Liquid.

TI10 dynamics — how the numbers increased during the tournament

As we mentioned in our previous articles, TI10 had a much more successful start than any of the previous tournaments in the series. In the group stage, when several matches were played simultaneously, the Average Viewers of the tournament were 711K people, and the Peak Viewers were 1.13 million people.

During the main event, the Average and Peak TI10 Viewers number increased slightly compared to the group stage - 827K and 1.48 million people, respectively. The growth was 16% and 31%, respectively.

The situation changed significantly on the last day of the tournament, when the lower tournament final and the grand final were held. Compared to the rest of the playoffs, the Average Viewers number was 90% up and the Peak Viewers number was 84% up!

The most popular TI10 teams

The most popular team at The International 10 was Team Spirit. It became the leader both in total Hours Watched (due to the fact that the team played the most matches) and the Average Viewers, which reached more than 805K spectators.

The second place went to PSG.LGD. Its matches had 767.7K Average Viewers. And that's almost 27% more than Team Secret had, which was third in this metric.

It is noteworthy that in fourth place was OG, which finished behind Invictus Gaming, Vici Gaming and Virtus.pro at the tournament, but still outpaced them by Average Viewers - 517.9K. The top 5 was closed by VP with the Average Viewers number of 481.3K people.

Most popular languages

The major languages of The International 10 broadcasts were English and Russian: in total they had  more than 80% of the total Hours Watched of the tournament. Overall, English was ahead of Russian (41.6% vs. 38.6%), and only on the final day of the main event the situation changed and Russian took the lead (45.2% vs. 38.3%).

At the same time, Russian proved to be the most popular in terms of Peak Viewers. More than 1.2 million viewers of Russian-language broadcasts concurrently watched the TI10 Grand Final. This is 205K more than the English-language streams had. It should also be noted, that China still has the biggest Dota audience in the world: even though there’s no reliable data, we can say for sure that there are millions of viewers watching TI every year.

The other languages were significantly behind Russian and English, and third place went to Spanish, which had 3.3% of TI10 Hours Watched. Another 2.7% were from Thailand. You can find other language statistics on the tournament's page if you have a PRO subscription.

How much has The International's audience grown in recent years?

Audience of The International is growing year by year. The 2017 event had only 44.3M Hours Watched, but this number more than doubled by 2021! With each event viewers spent 20-40% more time watching TI.

Also, the Peak Viewers of the championships increased in a similar way. The International 2017 was watched by only up to 925K people concurrently, but by 2019 that number had doubled. Compared to TI7, the Peak Viewers number of TI10 has increased by almost 200%!

Despite the problems The International 10 had, it became the most watched tournament in Dota 2 history - a huge success not only for Valve, but for the entire Dota 2 community. Let’s hope that next time the “Welcome to The International” line will be spoken in front of a huge offline audience at TI11, and the event itself will be even more popular than TI10.