We’re delighted to announce the start of our partnership with Stream Hatchet. Based in Barcelona, Stream Hatchet is a company which tracks key data and analytics within esports such as viewership trends and other streaming stats.
Every Tuesday you can now expect an article discussing a different key stat delivered by the company. Stream Hatchet receives their data through tools that have been built to collect metrics such as hours watched, avg ccv and total viewers through their Twitch API whilst also collecting data from YouTube, Mixer, Smashcast and, in the near future, Facebook.
This week we will be looking at the Dota 2 International main event which was hosted over five days from the 20th to 25th of August 2018. The annual event is considered to be one of the largest and most distinguished within the esports industry. Furthermore, the 2018 International boasted the largest prize pool to date; $24,920,540 which beat last years $24,687,919 by a fraction. A total of 18 organisations were involved including OpTic Gaming, Fnatic, Team Liquid and many more of the largest brands in the esports world. OG, from underdogs to champions, in a once in a lifetime Cinderella story stormed the open qualifiers, group stage and all the way through the upper bracket eventually defeating PSG.LDG and taking home the lion’s share of the prize pool.
Dota 2 has established itself as one of esports main top tier titles worldwide and this year’s International continues to prove this.
The International has taken the third spot for the most watched esports event to date with a huge 41.4 million hours watched along with a 574,000 concurrent viewership according to Stream Hatchet. The large majority of these viewers (60%+) are understood to be from the CIS region. Without going into the history of Dota and why the game appeals to that demographic specifically, one could argue that the viewer numbers for that region could be down to the success of Virtus Pro leading up to the International and Team Winstrike having a majority of Russian players. Keep in mind that that this tournament was streamed exclusively on Twitch. The Amazon owned steaming platform is banned in China, hence why that region as a whole is out ranked by the CIS powerhouse.
The second most watched esports event is the ELEAGUE 2018 Major showing off 53.1 million hours watched and an enormous 1.3 million concurrent viewers. The top spot in hours watched is currently held by the Overwatch League with 68.6 million hours and 424,700 concurrent viewers – take into account that the Overwatch League spanned 8 months, therefore giving it a considerable edge on that metric compared to that of a major Valve tournament spanning just over two weeks at best.
Esports Insider says: The International is without a doubt one of the most prestigious events of the year, and after moving to Vancouver for the main event, it’s off to China next August. How that affects the viewing numbers, only time will tell but one thing is for sure, it will remain one of the greatest celebrations of esports the world will cherish in 2019.