The International 2022 viewership analysis: a tournament that didn't live up to its expectations

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The International 2022 came to an end on the 30th of October. The tournament is one of the biggest esports events of the year and provided Dota 2 fans with some great matches, outplays, and unforgettable moments. However, this year TI was also marked by a big drop in viewership, which was due to the change in the tournament broadcasting structure, and the region where the event was held.

As mentioned previously, TI viewership suffered a massive drop, with this year's edition being the only one in the past five years that didn't see a viewership increase compared to its previous events of the series. With 1.7 million Peak Viewers, 67 million Hours Watched, and 563K Average Viewers, it had the worse viewership of the past three editions of the tournament.

One of the main reasons for the decrease in viewership we saw in this edition of the tournament, was the timezone of the event. TI 2022 took place in Singapore, which meant the games didn't happen at a good time for European fans. Most Dota 2 fans are from Western and Eastern Europe, so with games happening early in the morning (5-6 AM for most countries in Europe), the tournament lost many of its European viewers, which had a massive impact on its viewership numbers. 

This year broadcasting structure was also different. Normally Valve would take complete control of the event and the way it was broadcasted. However, this year's Last Chance Qualifier and Group Stage were organized & streamed by PGL, with regional broadcasts going to local studios from different countries. Only in the playoffs did the event return to its “original” form, with matches being broadcasted on the main channels of TI. 

Since many viewers were used to watching the entire tournament on the main channels, and this year games were broadcasted by multiple channels, it had an impact on viewership. Besides that, this year we also had a lot of co-streams of the event (as usual), but most of them had a 15-minute delay during LCQ & Group Stage, which was not very appealing to the viewers. 

One should also note that the hype around the tournament wasn’t as big as it was in the previous edition. In 2021 we had the first TI in two years, so fans were excited to see teams return to the biggest stage in Dota 2. Together with the fact we had an EEU team making it into the grand final, and claiming the title, we can see why the event was much more exciting to watch, and why much more viewers tuned in. 

When we look at the average viewership of the event during all the days the tournament lasted, we can conclude that TI11 had way fewer viewers tuning in than TI10. While TI10 had more than 600K concurrent viewers throughout the entire tournament, this year only three days were able to surpass that mark, with four days being below 500K AV. Day 9 was the closest one between both editions, with TI10 having 820K AV and TI11 having 672K AV. In the grand final, the difference was astonishing, with the previous edition having 1.5 million Average Viewers, while this year's event had only 908K AV. The fact that in 2021 the grand final went to five games and was a very close series, versus the 3:0 sweep we had this year, certainly played a part in the viewership stats, as a back-and-forth match captivates the attention of many more viewers than a one-way series. 

Languages and platforms statistics

In this year's edition, some languages (yet not the major ones) reached a new viewership record and showed astonishing growth. The Ukrainian language is the perfect example of this, with the official Ukrainian language stream reaching 46K Peak Viewers, a number that crushed the previous PV record for Ukrainian esports coverage which was 33.3K PV reached at the BLAST Premier 2022 Spring Finals. Since the start of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia that Ukraine has started having its official broadcast and seeing an increase in its official language streams, and this event further solidifies that trend. 

T11 also had three new languages that weren't represented last year. These languages were Polish, Khmer, and Tamil. The Kmer and Slovak languages also saw their viewership increase within Dota 2, with Kmer growing 71.3% and Slovak 0.86% by Peak Viewers. 

But it wasn't only languages that broke their viewership records since one streaming platform did as well. TikTok reached a new peak viewership record, with the platform viewership growing 99.7% compared to the previous most popular Dota 2 tournament broadcasted on the platform. TikTok is also one of the new platforms that broadcasted TI this year, together with Trovo which reached 12K Peak Viewers.

Most popular channels of TI11

Regarding the official broadcast channels of the tournament, dota2ti was the most popular one with 381K Peak Viewers. The dota2ti_ru Russian broadcast secured second place with 285K Peak Viewers, while the Dota official YouTube stream had 234K Peak Viewers and was third in the category. 

As mentioned above, this year's broadcast structure was very different from the one in previous editions, with multiple channels streaming the event. Nix, who is an ex-pro player, and a very well know Russian streamer, had the most popular channel of the event. Nix co-stream was one of the few that didn't have a 15-minute delay during LCQ & Group Stage, which lead many Russian-speaking viewers to choose his stream to watch the event. During the grand final, his broadcast reached an astonishing 206K Peak Viewers, becoming the fourth most popular channel of the entire event. 

Just_NS is one of the most famous Dota support players ever, being involved in the competitive scene of the game almost since its beginning. He is also a very well know and loved caster and analyst, with most fans appreciating his insight about the game. Just_NS stream had 114K Peak Viewers during the final and was the seventh most popular stream of the event, the second if we count only co-streams. 

Gorgc is yet another Dota 2 player that had a very successful co-stream this TI. He has been playing professionally since 2016, and also has a very popular stream. Gorgc had the most popular English co-stream, and the tenth most popular overall, with 102K Peak Viewers. 

Among other popular co-streamers, we had Peruvian content creator piootv who had 29.3K simultaneous viewers and broadcasted on Facebook, being the most popular streamer of the discipline on the platform. Arthas Ludik is one of the most popular content creators of the EEU region, and he also coined some of the terms that are used in the game by players from the region. The Russian streamer broadcasts had 29K Peak Viewers. Another popular streamer was buster. The popular Russian streamer had 39K simultaneous viewers tuning into his broadcast, making him the fourth most popular co-stream of the event. 

Compared to the previous TI’s, this year's edition had the fourth most popular match in DOTA 2 history, and it was the most popular Dota 2 match of 2022. The grand final between Tundra Esports and Team Secret had 1.7 million Peak Viewers, which is not a bad number by any means but is almost 1 million Peak Viewers less than the TI10 grand final, which went to five games and was one of the most exciting finals in the tournament history. It also had less PV than the lower bracket final of TI10, and the historic grand final of TI9, which saw OG and Team Liquid facing each other for the Aegis. 

As a tournament, it had the third biggest number of Peak Viewers, with 1.7 million Peak Viewers, which was achieved in the event's grand final. It was still a much more popular tournament than TI 2017 or 2018, but it falls behind TI 2019 and is miles away from reaching the viewership success of TI 10. 

TI11 wasn’t the success Dota 2 fans hoped for, with the tournament being plagued by many problems such as broadcast mistakes, a bad time zone for the majority of its viewers, 15 minutes delay for the majority of co-streams during first stages of the event which made them unappealing for viewers, and other issues. It certainly wasn't the huge success of its predecessor, but it still managed to entertain thousands of fans from all around the world and gave us some memorable moments, so not everything was bad. Going forward Valve will certainly find ways to fix some of the mistakes that took place in this year's edition, making Dota 2 a more appealing game for viewers.