EPIC League Season 2: Viewership results

The Dota 2 EPIC League lives up to its name. Despite the unsatisfactory situation with the discipline as a whole, Epic Esports Events managed to hold a fairly large-scale event and broke both their own records and discipline’s records.

The league consisted of open and closed qualifiers, Play-In and the final stage (divided into two divisions). The matches took place from November 11 to December 13 and today we will tell you of the newly achieved records.

The records set by the first division

The first division had eight teams fight for $500,000. Considering the generally unstable situation of the discipline’s pro scene, the success achieved by this division was unprecedented. It amassed 21 million hours watched, becoming the most watched Dota 2 event among those not belonging to The International series.

The tournament had stable viewership indicators, which led to such large hours watched figure, and yet its dominance wasn’t absolute – as its peak viewers indicator amounted only to 263 thousand. This is the seventh best result of all the Dota 2 events this year - and the record is still held by ESL One Los Angeles, despite it being 2 million hours watched behind.

The final encounter between Virtus.Pro and OG became the most popular match and gathered 263 thousand peak viewers. The top 5 popular matches also included two matches with the participation of NA’VI. The most interesting thing here is that “Born to Win” played only two matches in the finals before leaving the tournament – but still managed to become the most popular team with 125 thousand average viewers.

Virtus.Pro became the winners of the tournament, falling short of merely 683 viewers from bypassing NA’VI’s match viewership indicators. Leading by hours watched were OG, with the corresponding indicator being influenced by their participation in the lower bracket of the final stage.

The tournament’s most popular broadcast was Dota2ruhub with 103 thousand peak viewers. Epicenter’s official English broadcast attracted 77 thousand peak viewers. Additionally, the pro players (such as Gorgc and Sh4dowehhh) launched their broadcasts as well, while also broadcasting on the organizer’s channels. This allowed the epic_sh4doweh broadcast to gather 22 thousand peak viewers.

The Russian-speaking viewers made up most of the audience, being responsible for 52% of the total number of views. Such a result is considerably high for a tournament – to compare, the corresponding contribution of Russian-speaking viewers to the OMEGA League from WePlay! Esports amounted to 41%.

What was interesting regarding the second division

The second division had a prize pool of $50,000, with the number of teams remaining the same (a total of eight teams).

A clear favorite of the viewers of the second division was the winning team, Alliance. Its final match versus Live to Win gathered 130 thousand peak viewers. Additionally, four of Alliance’s encounters with the other teams were in the top-5 matches.

The tournament’s most popular broadcast was the dota2ruhub one, with 58 thousand peak viewers. Following it was epicenter_en1 with 42 thousand viewers. 64,2% of hours watched were contributed by the Russian-speaking viewers, while the English-speaking viewers were responsible for the remaining part of the result.

Alliance gathered 58 thousand average viewers and became the tournament’s most popular team by this indicator. Following it was Just Error with 53 thousand average viewers. While Just Error was a team full of strong players, its roster was disbanded once the EPIC League had ended.

Overall, the EPIC League showed quite good results (considering the currently disappointing situation of the discipline as a whole), as it ended up overtaking all of the lengthy Dota 2 events as of late, not to mention exceeding the results of the league’s first season.