PGL Wallachia Season 1 sets record concurrent viewership for Dota in 2024

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The PGL Wallachia Season 1 concluded on May 19 at the PGL Studios in Bucharest, Romania, after around ten days of intense action. Apart from getting off to a great start as a new addition to Dota 2's esports calendar by attracting almost 490K Peak Viewers, it showed some interesting language dynamics, which will be discussed below.

Having come through six regional qualifiers, some of the world's best Dota 2 sides faced off across two stages for a total prize pool of $1M, with the winner pocketing $300K. At the end of it all, Team Spirit beat Xtreme Gaming 3:2 in a closely fought encounter to emerge as the series' inaugural champion.

  PGL Wallachia Season 1 — viewership stats and most popular games   

The PGL Wallachia Season 1 hit 487.4K PV during the Grand Final between the reigning world champion and the Saudi Arabian side looking to stamp its authority on the global stage. It also did 14.8M Hours Watched and 130K Average Viewers over an airtime of 114 hours, making it a highly successful debut venture for the organizer.

The tournament winner's superb performances were a big part of these huge numbers, with the esports organization appearing in all five of the most popular games list. In fact, two of its clashes with the competition runner-up make this leaderboard, with the sole Group Stage encounter here coming from its all-Russian clash with BetBoom Team.

It was a pretty narrow fight when it came to the most popular side by average online viewers, but one side sneaked ahead by around 2.5K concurrent viewers. Regardless, the audience support for the esports organizations seen here will please PGL, who will be hosting this series — involving teams from Western Europe, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, North America, China, and South America — until 2026.

An analysis of the group stage matches showed that English and Russian saw a reversal in fortunes compared to the ESL One Birmingham 2024. This continued in the Playoffs, meaning that across the entire event, the latter language saw a jump of more than 13.5% in its watch time, while the former saw its share fall by almost 8%.

  PGL Wallachia Season 1 — top channels   

Most importantly, with an extra team representing the country, Russian saw a jump of 125% in its peak concurrent viewership compared to the England Dota 2 competition. One factor that helped with this spike was the increase in the number of channels live-streaming and following the action. Specifically, one big name in the Russian Dota 2 content creation community, rostislav_999, brought a lot of new viewers to this competition, and he ended up as the most popular co-caster.

Conversely, even though the number of channels for English also went up slightly, its figures suffered due to the lack of a proper representative reaching the latter rounds. Team Liquid was the best-performing team, reaching the Lower Bracket Quarterfinals before losing to another Chinese side, G2.iG.

  Most popular Dota 2 tournaments since 2023   

The PGL Wallachia Season 1 also ended as the most popular Dota 2 tournament of 2024 so far, doing 35% better than the next-best entry. It also had 48.4% more PV than the Birmingham event despite being behind at the end of the Group Stage, showing that fan interest went up thanks to the quality of the action and the teams that competed in the Playoffs.

  Most popular Dota 2 competitions in 2024   

It also became the fifth most popular tournament in the discipline since 2023, doing higher Peak Viewership figures than The Bali Major 2023, the four DreamLeague competitions, and the ESL One Kuala Lumpur 2023. That there was potential for this tournament to have larger numbers had the likes of Gaimin Gladiators, BB Team, and Virtus.pro reached the Playoffs should spell good news for the series and the rest of the year, especially with the Esports World Cup coming up.