This weekend saw the finals of Dota 2’s The International 2019 Championships take place in Shanghai, with the biggest prize pool for a single esports tournament yet – over $34 million (£27.7 million) – and team OG defeating Team Liquid to take the win. Now, it seems that the game has also seen another new record linked to the event – The International 9 saw over one million viewers on Twitch, making it the biggest of the Dota 2 tournaments, and Dota 2’s most-viewed event ever.
As reported by videogame statistics site GitHyp, the game set a new viewer count record on Sunday morning during the tournament’s finals, reaching a peak of just over 1.1 million viewers on the streaming platform. This beat its nearest ‘rival’ event – The International in 2017 – which saw a Twitch viewers peak of 845k, the previous highest total.
This is a pretty impressive result considering that for many of Twitch’s viewers, based in the United States, the finals would have been taking place during the night and early into the morning. It looks like a lot of Dota 2 fans were keen to stay up and see the gripping showdown that saw OG triumph 3-1 over runner-up Team Liquid.
Last year’s The International had a peak Twitch viewership of around 730k according to GitHyp’s charts, so this year’s numbers are quite an increase.
The event also saw new hero Void Spirit unveiled, materialised on-stage, who will head to Dota 2 – and Dota Underlords – later this year as part of the upcoming Outlanders Update.