Viewership statistics for The International 2024 Playoff Day 1

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The International 2024 Playoffs, Dota 2’s annual world championship, opened with modest viewership but still managed to secure the game the seventh spot among the most popular esports titles of the year.

  2024 most popular esports titles (as of Sep 9)  

The group stage’s opening day received 12.7% less watch time than last year. Unfortunately, heading into the playoffs stage, viewership remained similar to the groups, with key audiences recording fewer concurrent viewers than last year.

Read also: The International 2024 got off to one of the worst starts in the history of the series

Team Spirit were the favourites coming out of the groups as the only team to have achieved a flawless group stage. However, the team lost against nouns in the seeding decider, and have been sent to the lower bracket. This seeding decider match was the most popular match of the event at the time, before being overtaken by the opening day of playoffs. 

Cloud9 was the only team to finish top of their group and win the opening upper bracket quarter-final round. Although the stage has featured some upsets and top organizations, viewership is still on a downturn. 

Of all the games throughout the opening day of playoffs, Tundra’s match against Team Falcons was most popular. Both of these teams have multiple TI champions on their side, but Tundra Esports managed to throw Team Falcons down to the lower bracket with a convincing 2-0 victory. The match reached 709.5K Peak Viewers, becoming the most popular game of the entire event so far.

In broad terms, the first day of matches received 4.8M Hours Watched in total, and maintained an average viewership of 433.2K concurrent viewers. Watch time for the opening day fell by 31.5% compared to 2023, and all three major languages for the esports title recorded negative dynamics compared to last year. 

Aside from Tundra’s triumphant victory against Team Falcons, Gaimin Gladiators’ match against nouns was the next-most popular game, having reached 609.7K Peak Viewers. The peak viewership reached on Day 1 was 31.7% lower than last year’s, and this top game was significantly more-watched than the other matches which took place on the same day. 

Viewership by all metrics for this year’s The International event. Viewership is able to show signs of potential for highlight games such as Team Tundra against Falcons, but generally, this year the event is missing the excitement generated by previous world championships. At this rate, the event will likely be less popular than The International 2023, which already recorded a sizeable drop in peak viewership compared to the previous year. 

As of the evening of September 9, two more playoffs matches have concluded, both lower-bracket rounds. Firstly, Talon Esports were eliminated by BetBoom Team 2-1, who now have to face nouns in the second lower-bracket round, and 1w Team defeated Team Zero. Nouns are currently playing against BetBoom, and Team Falcons match gainst 1w Team will begin shortly. Track the live viewership statistics for the matches through The International 2024’s tournament page.