I recently watched several of The International 4 matches. I’d never seen Dota 2 before and, while it was entertaining, some of the games seemed to drag on a bit longer than I expected. As a mediocre SC2 player, my games are over in 15 minutes. I guess zergling rushes don’t exist in Dota 2. So I searched the forums for average game length, and was surprised by how many discussions there were with a lot of individual opinions but no consensus answer. Obviously, game length is different for average players than it is for pros, but it was easier to get game length results from premier tournaments, so that’s what I’ve used here. I added League of Legends to make the graph slightly more interesting.

For SC2, I used GSL tournaments, including Up & Down, Code A, and Code S matches.

For Dota2, I used The International (2, 3, and 4), but only Captains Mode games.

I don’t know anything about LoL, so I tried to choose tournaments that had the most prize money. That included Season 3 World Championship, PANDORA.TV Champions Winter 2013-2014, HOT6iX Champions Summer 2013, and a couple slightly smaller ones that reported game lengths.

Data sources:

http://lol.gamepedia.com/Premier_Tournaments

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Premier_Tournaments

http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/ti4