North American and Chinese qualifiers for The International 2024 highlight downward viewership trend

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Dota 2 is once again building up to its most popular tournament of the year: Valve’s The International. Qualifiers have begun in many regions across the globe, with teams fighting it out for the few spots available at the event. Recently, the Chinese and North American qualifiers finished, and unfortunately, viewership is the lowest it has been for these qualifiers in years.

For 2024, Valve has reworked the qualifiers for The International. In previous years teams who competed in the Dota Pro Tour were invited, but this circuit has been dissolved. For the new system, tournament organizers PGL invited teams to the qualifiers, as well as allowed teams to move up through an open tournament. In North America, three teams were invited and five qualified through the open, and in China, six teams were invited and six teams qualified. 

Of these 20 total teams across both regions, only 3 spots were available for this year’s The International: one in North America’s circuit and two in China’s. After a tense double elimination bracket in both events, nouns qualified for TI through the North American qualifier for the second year in a row. In China, teams Team Zero and G2.iG qualified. 

In The International 2024: North America Closed Qualifier, the final match of the event between nouns and Shopify Rebellion was the most popular, reaching 61.8K Peak Viewers. This marked a significant increase in viewership compared to the next-most popular match, and a stark increase from the 20.1K Average Viewers.

In total, the event garnered 811.9K Hours Watched across just over 40 hours of broadcasting time. In comparison, the Chinese event received significantly more viewership, even though we are unable to account for Chinese live-streaming platform viewership statistics, due to the unreliability of the data publicly reported by these sites.

The International 2024: China Closed Qualifier was markedly more watched than its North American counterpart, receiving 1.16M Hours Watched and holding an average viewership of 24.9K AV. Viewership for the event was not only more stable on average, but reached higher peaks for many more matches.

Peak viewership for the Chinese qualifier culminated at 64.5K Peak Viewers for Azure Ray’s match against G2.iG. This match not only reached a higher overall peak than the North American series, but also saw multiple matches reach over 50K concurrent viewers, something the American event came nowhere close to. 

Viewership for both of these events have decreased compared to previous years, although these qualifier events rely heavily on which teams are competing to generate viewership, and the viewership can therefore be volatile. In 2023, the North American qualifiers had its viewership significantly boosted by the participation of B8, a Ukrainian team which was allowed to play through the North American circuit thanks to a special exception. They were the most popular team of the event and significantly impacted the viewership of the event, which we will look at below. 

Viewership for the past three qualifiers of The International’s North American and Chinese circuits

Across the past three qualifier events for each region, 2024 marked a serious downturn in viewership. The 2023 qualifier in North America received 122.9K PV, and the Chinese 2022 qualifier received 138.7K PV. The International is Dota 2’s premiere event of the year, but it seems that interest is falling among fans for these qualifier events. 

The 2024 North American qualifier suffered from a significant drop in Spanish and Russian-language viewership compared to 2023. Although the 2024 and 2023 qualifiers were covered by the exact same amount of channels, the 2023 edition received an abnormal amount of interest from Spanish-speaking, Russian-speaking, and Ukrainian-speaking fans. This proved to ultimately be irreplicable for the 2024 edition.

North American viewership has rarely been a significant portion of Dota 2’s esports audience, but nevertheless, the falling viewership for both of these qualifiers are not a good sign for Dota 2 esports, which is currently going through a transitional period away from the DPC.

The International 2024 begins this September, and Esports Charts will not only track viewership data for this event, but continue to track statistics for the world’s qualifying events as these continue. Dota 2 has to prove it can still garner the attention of millions of fans as it has done in past years without the DPC in play. Keep track of the constantly evolving scene with Esports Charts objective viewership statistics.