How popular was Riyadh Masters 2023?

Riyadh Masters 2023 featured 20 of the world’s best teams and had a prize pool of $15 million. It lasted for nearly two weeks and had great production values. From start to finish, the event felt pretty epic. The only thing it lacked was a passionate live audience.

If we ignore this last component, we could regard Riyadh Masters 2023 as one of the most important events in the history of Dota 2 apart from The International and the epic Majors that were organized by Valve around seven years ago. So the question is: how popular was this tournament relative to some of the other big events?

Riyadh Masters viewership numbers

According to Esports Charts, Riyadh Masters had 202.000 average viewers and 588.000 peak viewers. The tournament was watched for a total of 30 million hours and had an airtime of ~149 hours. As usual, the most popular match was the Grand Final between Team Liquid and Team Spirit, won by Spirit with a score of 3-1.

Liquid won the first game and were very close to winning the second game as well. But in the end, the CIS squad proved to be stronger. This was Liquid’s 5^th Grand Final defeat in 2023, which must feel pretty bad. But overall, they should be proud of themselves. This level of consistency is very hard to attain.

Maybe there are more important things than winning 🤔@TeamLiquid finished 2nd Place in these four events and yet they were the Most Watched Team on all of them! 🤯

Learn more about your organization with our Teams Dashboard! 👕https://t.co/BjOEF1Paw6 pic.twitter.com/9M9N4Okv7f

— Esports Charts 🇺🇦 (@EsportsCharts) August 1, 2023

Putting the numbers into perspective

To better understand whether Riyadh Masters was a success or a failure from a viewership perspective, we need to compare it to some of the other big tournaments from the distant and recent history of Dota 2.

Here are three events and their viewership numbers according to Escharts:

• The Kiev Major 2017: 321.000 average viewers; 842.000 peak viewers
• Riyadh Masters 2022: 200.000 average viewers; 363.000 peak viewers
• The International 2022: 563.000 average viewers; 1.75 million peak viewers
• The Bali Major 2023: 175.000 average viewers; 475.000 peak viewers

As we can see, Riyadh Masters 2023 was comparable to that of last year and slightly more successful than the recent Bali Major, which was a complete disaster in terms of production.

Given that Riyadh Masters 2022 had a prize pool of $4.2 million and similar viewership numbers, it’s pretty clear that the Dota 2 audience doesn’t care very much about how big the prize pool is. What generates interest is something completely different and has to do with how epic the atmosphere of the event is.

Header: Esports Saudi Federation