Worlds 2021, TI10 and PGL Major Stockholm will be held almost simultaneously — how will they share the audience?

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In 2021, for the first time in history, League of Legends, Dota 2, and CS:GO World Championships will be held in one month — all in European time. Despite the coronavirus restrictions, the events will take place offline. They will be hosted by Iceland, Romania, and Sweden. The championships will also compete for the online audience's attention. 

This will be a kind of confrontation between Valve and Riot Games because The International 10 and PGL Major Stockholm 2021 do not overlap in terms of dates. We have analyzed Twitch statistics and are ready to tell you who is more likely to take viewers away from whom and why you should not expect a large number of Russian-speaking viewers on Worlds 2021 broadcasts after the start of TI.

League of Legends vs. Dota 2

To compare the total audience of the three games, we proceeded from the audience figures of Valve games, where Dota 2 and CS:GO in total generated the most Hours Watched on English-speaking, Russian-speaking, and Portuguese-speaking streams. It should be noted that these figures do not allow us to draw unambiguous conclusions but illustrate general patterns.

To analyze the intersection of the esports audience of LoL and Dota 2 / CS:GO, we took comparable regional and international championships. In the case of Dota these are qualifiers for TI, WePlay AniMajor for the Russian and English-speaking audience, and ESL One Fall 2021 for the Portuguese-speaking (since the Brazilian team performed there, unlike AniMajor).

According to statistics, the English-speaking and Portuguese-speaking audiences of League of Legends practically do not watch Dota, and rather the Dota enthusiasts themselves will opt for the LoL championship — especially the Brazilians (about 20%).

At the same time, the situation with the Russian-speaking audience is completely different. Russian-language fans of League of Legends are more likely to watch DOTA tournaments than vice versa: as is well known, League of Legends is a niche discipline in the region. 

Only 2% of the Russian-speaking viewers of WePlay AniMajor watched Mid-Season Invitational, while 22.4% of MSI viewers watched WePlay AniMajor. In short, during the first days of Worlds 2021, Russian-speaking MOBA fans are likely to opt for The International, where two representatives of the CIS will play: Virtus.pro and Team Spirit.

League of Legends vs. CS:GO

CS:GO Major will begin almost immediately after The International 10, and its decisive matches will take place at the same time as the final battles at Worlds 2021. In addition, the CS:GO esports ecosystem is going through a pandemic much smoother than Dota: the audience of the game is only growing and there are significantly more big tournaments than in Dota 2. Let's take a closer look at the audience intersection of the two games. 

At least 10% of CS:GO tournament viewers watch the League of Legends competitions. At the same time, among the English-speaking and Portuguese-speaking viewers of top CS:GO tournaments, the chance to meet a LoL fan is higher than the other way around. But it’s all upside-down for CIS, where only 2% of StarLadder CIS RMR viewers were interested in the regular season of LCL.

During international events, the general audience of League of Legends and CS:GO tournaments increases. At the same time, Brazilian LoL fans follow the Counter-Strike championships with much more interest than English-speaking ones (22.5% vs. 8.5%). 

Statistics on Russian-speaking viewers confirm that League of Legends is not ready to compete with Valve games in the CIS. Less than 2% of CS:GO viewers watched LCL/MSI in the current season. At the same time, about 15% of several tens of thousands of LoL fans are consistently interested in international Counter-Strike events with the participation of Natus Vincere and other local teams.

Riot Games and Valve have always held their main tournaments on separate dates for a reason

No doubt, League of Legends is a much more successful brand than Dota 2 or CS:GO. It has more active players and viewers, it is much more successful in the fan service, and it’s the most profitable PC title after all. But despite all this, the media still regularly doubt that League beats Dota as a game. And not least due to esports.

Of the two companies, it was Riot Games that became an esports pioneer. This was very important because League of Legends was created as a game for the already formed gaming community of DotA Allstars. And the first competitive season of LoL from Riot was quite successful: qualifiers around the world, almost 100K dollars in prize money (and the same number of viewers), well-known participating teams. But all this paled in comparison with Valve's PR move: in August 2011, a month after the final of the first Worlds, Gabe Newell's company not only announced the Dota 2 show but also presented a tournament for it — with an enormous prize fund of a million dollars. 

Riot Games learned the lesson. By the second season of Worlds, its prize fund had grown 20 times (up to $2 million), and Riot began to invest much more in the development of the League of Legends esports scene. And since then, Worlds began to take place after TI: perhaps Riot wanted always to have a little time left to respond to some new Valve trick. However, this has not been necessary for ten years: Worlds is still much more popular, but The International breaks records in terms of prize funds in esports time after time.

In Brazil, every fifth Dota 2 viewer also follows League of Legends, but it is almost impossible to meet Dota fans among LoL fans. At the same time, CS:GO is extremely popular in the country, and shared audience of the two disciplines can exceed 20% of each of the samples during international LoL tournaments. The interest in Dota is slightly higher among the English-speaking esports viewers, but LoL is more interesting for those who follow CS:GO. The exclusion region is the CIS, where League of Legends is interesting to only 2% of the CS:GO and Dota 2 audiences.

Overall, Worlds 2021 hardly runs the risk of losing a lot of viewers to The International 10 and PGL Major Stockholm 2021. On average, esports fans (especially English speakers) will choose a League of Legends tournament. One of the exceptions is the CIS: the majority of Russian-speaking esports fans will ignore LoL World Championship. Meanwhile, Worlds 2021 is already live, only one day left till the start of TI10, and the CS:GO major starts on October 23.