Total hours watched across all Dota 2 TI8 Twitch channels reached 41.7M for the entirety of the competition, an increase of 12.6% from 2017.

Max concurrent viewership (max CCV) was 626.8K, an 8.3% decrease from last year, which may be due to, among other factors, Valve broadcasting the event on its own SteamTV platform.

Next year’s The International will be held in Shanghai, China, where the majority of the competition’s livestream viewership resides.

Before the competition was over, Dota 2’s The International 2018 (TI8) was already making headlines with its highest ever prize pool of $25M. The competition has surpassed its predecessor when it comes to Twitch viewership: accruing 41.7M total hours watched across all the official broadcasts, from the start of the group stages to the Grand Final, and including special events like the All-Star and OpenAI showcase matches.

This is a 12.6% increase from TI7’s total hours watched of 37.1M, and doesn’t even include any of the unofficial broadcasts by Dota 2 streamers. On the day of the grand finals, all the official channels (Main/English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Newcomer) totaled 6.7M total hours watched, an increase of 5.2M from the previous year.

All this aside, peak viewership on Twitch for the grand finals was actually less than the 2017 edition of the competition. Once again aggregating data from all the official channels, the finals reached a max CCV of 626.8K, down roughly 8.3% from 683.6K in 2017.

Although there was no official The International YouTube stream this year, Valve was broadcasting the competition from its newly released SteamTV service. The developer has not released viewership metrics for the platform as of yet.

Next year’s edition of The International will take place in Shanghai, China, a region which has sent teams to both the TI8 and TI7 grand finals. Chinese streaming platforms also potentially provide most of the competition’s audience, though any exact figures presented are often treated with skepticism, due to unreliable API’s, and server instability from Chinese streaming sites.

Over the course of the next Dota Pro Circuit, it’ll be worth keeping an eye on the SteamTV platform, and how Valve positions it within the esport’s ecosystem. Like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive , Valve has traditionally kept Dota 2 open to both third-party tournament organizers and platforms, and it’s highly unlikely it will implement any kind of exclusive broadcasting hold over The International, or any of the Major and Minor competitions. That said, given the controversy earlier this year when the ESL One-approved events went Facebook exclusive, it’ll be interesting to see how Valve leverages its fresh, new competitor to Twitch and other streaming video platforms.