The International 2022 main event kicked off — the longest match and poor viewership

Loading

The first day of The International 2022 playoffs was criticised by viewers for poor production, but ended with a great match that lasted more than 1.5 hours, which became the new record of TI main events. In the new material, Esports Charts will tell you how the knockout stage started, what the fans were dissatisfied with, and how much viewers the tournament lacks compared to previous event of the series.

According to the results of the first day of the playoffs, Hokori, Fnatic, Royal Never Give Up and Team Spirit, TI10 champion, were eliminated. They lost to beastcoast, Gaimin Gladiators, Entity and BOOM Esports in the lower bracket, respectively. At the same time, the match between Entity and RNG became the icing on the cake of the first day, since teams fought for right to continue their path in the tournament for 107 minutes. Thunder Awaken defeated Evil Geniuses and became the first ever South American team to make it to the top-6 of The International. Team Secret knocked out PSG.LGD, one of the favorites of the tournament, to the lower bracket and also made it to the top-6.

Tomorrow, October 21, EG will fight with beastcoast, and PSG.LGD will fight with BOOM Esports in survival matches. The day will begin with the matches of Tundra Esports against OG and Team Liquid against Aster in the upper bracket.

Viewership Statistics of TI11 Playoffs Day 1

It is worth saying that TI11 returned to the usual format of brodacasts. Official streams went back to specialized channels, broadcasts were available on SteamTV and in the Dota 2 client, Maincast covered matches in Ukrainian in a studio format, and community casters got the opportunity to stream without delay. You can find out how the group stage of the tournament went in our review.

In total, the matches of the first day of the playoffs collected more than 6.5 million Hours Watched with an average viewership of 575.4K concurrent viewers. The peak audience of the tournament at this stage was almost 926.9K people and was reached during the last match of the day between Entity and RNG. Note that this confrontation lasted more than 1.5 hours (107 minutes), which was a record figure in the history of The International playoffs. The top-3 matches by Peak Viewers also included Team Spirit vs. BOOM and Fnatic vs. GG.

Compared to the previous event of the series, the main stage of TI11 started much worse in terms of viewership. The Peak Viewers number decreased by 34%, the average audience went down by 30%, and the total Hours Watched was almost two times less compared to TI10 playoffs Day 1. Partly the decrease of HW is due to the fact that the first day of the TI11 playoffs had significantly less airtime even despite the record-breaking match. At the same time, the decrease in the Average Viewers still had a much greater effect.

English-language broadcasts continue to be the most popular at TI11, with viewers generating 42% of the total Hours Watched on the first day of the playoffs. At the same time, the Russian language became the leader by Peak Viewers, being ahead of English by 5.3K concurrent viewers. Also note that the peak and average audience of Ukrainian-language broadcasts doubled compared with the results of the group stage.

The most popular channel was the English-language Twitch channel dota2ti, which was not involved in the group stage coverage of the tournament. It accounted for over 26% of the playoffs' first day total. In second place is the Russian-speaking community caster Nix, whose contribution was 13.5%. It should be noted that the streamer updated his personal record by PV several times during the day: first, he reached over 155K concurrent viewers at the Team Spirit match against BOOM, and during the Entity match against RNG he was watched by up to 164.7K Peak Viewers. The top-3 in terms of Hours Watched also includes the Dota2 YouTube channel, where English, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese broadcasts were conducted.

***

Many Dota 2 fans criticized the start of the TI11 playoffs due to the quality of production, the lack of an opening ceremony, etc. All this, as well as an inconvenient timezone for European audience, heavily affects the viewership statistics of the tournament.