The attention given to eSports contests continues to grow exponentially as people look for distractions
The latest Gamers Without Borders (GWB) charity event ran successfully for three straight days of competition. This eSports tournament initiative is a $10 million fundraiser, which brought together eight of the top-performing Dota 2 teams. During the three days of competition, there were 23 hours of total airtime, and it was watched by followers for a total of 1.8 million hours, according to a report from GWB.
If this charity event is compared to other events that run for longer periods, it had more views than One Game Agency (OGA) Dota PIT 2020 Online: China. This event ran from May 1 through May 11 and it reported just over one million hours watched. Another popular event, the ESL One Los Angeles region – outside of Europe/CIS – also reported fewer views than the Gamers Without Borders competition. In just three days of this eSports tournament, there was an average of 77,579 viewers, which is even above WePlay! Pushka League Division 1.
Perhaps the fact that there only eight teams competing – the best teams – is the reason why most of the matches recorded high viewer retention. All matches reported an average of 100,000 viewers. During the quarter of finals, the highest peak was reported at 167.861 viewers – that match was between OF and Nigma. Another match that was close to reaching those same number of viewers was the final match that had Natus Vincere and Team Secret, and that hit 161,736 for the series.
This tournament Dota 2 series ran by GWB had impressive overall viewership numbers, which comes as no surprise since most of the top European and CIS teams attended the competition. This fact almost guarantees a large viewership since it is one of the largest regions when it comes to Dota 2 followers.
