Qualifications for The International, the most important esports tournament of the year, as always turned out to be one of the most spectacular shows of the year. Nevertheless, we can observe some huge problems of Dota 2 as the esports discipline.

At the peak of the broadcast, there were 546,000 people including Chinese — it is three times less than in the previous year. There were 196.000 spectators without Chinese. The ESC team collected statistics not only from official broadcasts but from user broadcasts.

The real massacre has occurred in the CIS region. The most popular commentator in the Russian-speaking community Vitaliy "v1lat" Volochai opened his own studio — Maincast, thereby he challenged RUHub and its long-standing domination. The battle was extremely tense.

Maincast had a lot of viewers on average. RUHub used heavy artillery and brought to itself popular streamers and players. Studio invited Alohadance, Noone, and Dread. Because of that, the amount of RUHUb viewers has grown dramatically, and the peak of the broadcast was 86,422 viewers. In turn, the peak of the Maincast broadcast was 59,255 people, which is also quite a lot. A complete failure can be called the work of the Starladder studio — the first day of the broadcast was attended by more than 3,457 viewers, but with each ether, their number fell down up to 300 people. Success can be called the work of Beyond The Summit. At the peak of the broadcast, the English studio gathered 53,687 spectators and had many viewers on average.

Hours Watched

Despite the explosive final day, the average amount of RUHub's viewers is less than that of Maincast — 16.393. The new studio gathered 21,629 people on average. Even BTS could not catch up with them — 20.827 on average. Starladder - 1202 people.

Beyond the Summit was watched by 2.154.774 hours. Next is Maincast - 1.954.571 hours. RUHub was unable to catch up with his competitor and collected a total of 1,751.137 hours. Starladder in the last place - 75.452.

UPD 26.06.2018

All information above relates to June 18-21, while qualifications were held until June 25.

Time has shown that RUHUB's positions in the CIS region remain unbreakable. The biggest advantage of Maincast was novelty, that is why many viewers returned back to RUHUB after several days. In short, Maincast lost the battle of the studios during the qualifications for TI8. It is easy to prove with our statistics: RUHUB has total 3 913 759 total watched hours, while Maincast has "only" 3 183 917. The war is not over yet, but if Maincast doesn't make any radical changes the studio will drown in the shadow of RUHUB. Nevertheless, It's funny that Beyond The Summit totaled twice more watched hours than any Russian studio — the English-speaking stream was watched for 6 341 981 hours.

It is symbolic that the most popular match of qualifications was the final in the CIS region. The same confrontation took the fifth place — it was the Winner Finals. OG was one of the most popular team of the qualification — there are two matches with them. If the "civil war" between TNC and TNCT gathered 4 thousand it would become the most popular match of the qualification.

Discuss in Discord - https://escharts.com/discord