The International 2024, the Dota 2 world championship organized by Valve, recently kicked off in Copenhagen. This year’s event has attracted even less attention than in previous years, mainly due to minimal promotional efforts. The schedule and team matchups were released only a few days before the tournament began, leading to complaints from both players and broadcasting staff. As a result, The International 2024 is seeing record-low prize pool growth, and early broadcast data indicates a drop in viewer interest.
Day 1 Viewership of The International 2024
With the group stage wrapping up and teams securing their spots in the playoffs, Team Spirit has emerged as the standout team, winning all three of their group matches and topping their group. Xtreme Gaming and Cloud9 also performed well, leading their respective groups. The playoffs are scheduled to start on September 8.
On the first day of broadcasts, The International 2024 accumulated just over 4.6 million Hours Watched, marking a 12.7% decline compared to last year’s event and one of the lowest in recent years. Other metrics were similarly underwhelming: average viewership was down 6.8% compared to the opening day of TI2023, while peak viewership saw a steep 32.9% drop.
In terms of language broadcasts, Russian, English, and Spanish maintained their usual shares from last year. However, viewership in all languages saw a decrease of around 25-30% in Average Viewers. One major factor behind the viewership drop is the reduced involvement of community casters. Independent streamers, who typically draw a significant portion of the audience, have nearly halved compared to last year. Notably, several prominent Russian-speaking community casters, including Arthas and rostislav_999, are missing from this year’s tournament, which likely cost tens of thousands of viewers in the statistics.
