Casper on the problems of modern Dota 2 tournaments
Author: Hawk Live LLC
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Tournament organizers have fallen into a trap of their own making.
Tournament formats need to be changed immediately, because if this is not done, people will soon stop watching this mess altogether.
I'll explain for those who are not quite in the know. In recent years, we have been observing a steady decline in views, regardless of the amount of prize money, studios, and organizers. This prompts organizers to "inflate" views by building formats where we see several RoundRobin group stages, where everyone plays with everyone and this significantly increases the potential number of views. However, these stages are pointless. Often, no one even drops out and just matches go for seed in the next stage or 1-2 teams out of 8 drop out. In addition to this, all matches go simultaneously on 4 broadcasts at once, which looks like complete chaos. This worked during The International and its qualifiers, because it was once a year. In this case, it leads to terrible fatigue and a catastrophic drop in interest from viewers. And the organizers have come up with nothing else but (intrigue!!!) to increase the number of these group stages and qualifiers to close gaps in statistics (geniuses), which leads to a further drop in indicators.
At the moment, the Play-In stage of the Riyadh Masters tournament is underway. At the same time, 6 matches take place on 6 broadcasts, which makes viewing unbearable for the viewer. As a result, the viewer either chooses one of the six matches, or does not watch the games at all and simply waits for the results. And due to the number of different qualifying stages, the value and importance of the matches for the viewer is falling. An exception may be a meeting of media-top teams. But, as a usually, such teams play already in the next stages of tournaments.
But this trap is not as simple as it might seem. Organizers have to do this to recoup the money spent on creating the tournament. These are not charities. Hosting a major costs a lot of money and sometimes the exhaust from it is enough for a pack of chips. That's why well-known TOs have already refused to host majors and that's why those who stayed are trying to squeeze all the juices out of the given opportunity.
It's all about saving money, because it's cheaper to play all the games on one day than to evenly distribute them over 2-3 days.
In addition, due to the fall in competition among TOs that are not financially supported by Valve, the quality of tournaments has also fallen. Because of what conflict situations began to arise, such as at the Bali Major.
The simplest (and most difficult at the same time) solution for themselves I see is to return to the times when majors were fully funded by Valve and to let the best tournament operators just do a quality show, not fearing to burn out due to lack of stats. For Valve, this is just a statistical issue in the graph of expenses, if we talk about the corporation as a whole.
In an ideal world, where all people are honest, this might work. But, it seems, it was precisely because of abuse of this system in the past that Valve refused to do so. It's a pity. There is not much time left until tournaments will be watched by anyone other than bettors.
Casper emphasizes that Valve is no longer organizing Dota 2 tournaments, having outsourced everything to companies that are only interested in profit. At the same time, Valve themselves previously collected record amounts of money from Battle Passes sales, and this money would be enough to host all the majors.
Maincast co-founder and commentator Vitalii «v1lat» Volochai agreed with his colleague and, as a comparison, drew attention to the views of the CS:GO tournament BLAST Premier: Fall Groups 2023
We can talk about all the "interest" in the number of views.
A simple BLASTA group stage match, an ordinary match of a tournament that has been going on for a week, and it's not even the playoffs or the finals, is watched more than all the matches of the first day of the 15,000,000 bucks tournament put together.
