The International 2016: Way bigger than the Olympics, and you didn't even know
The 17,000-strong arena was packed to capacity, the audience raucous. National flags were scattered as far as the eye could see. Announcements and music blared from the loud speakers. Loud, but not loud enough to drown out the chants that rang out. As did cheers. And boos.
The day's highlights played on huge screens. Elsewhere in the city, those unlucky enough not to get a pass, stood and watched it on the screens outside the stadium. Then there's the over 5 million people who tuned in online for the finals.
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But this wasn't the Rio Olympics. This was The International 2016 in Seattle, the most lucrative tournament in the history of e-Sport. If you read that and dismissed it as silly, think again. This event will hammer home the fact that competitive e-Sport has hit the big time and is here to stay.
Pure emotion from the fans for @EvilGeniuses crazy win against @EHOMECN at #ti6 pic.twitter.com/UrtA5J9VcZ
— Data (@missing_data) August 11, 2016
The International 2016 is big money
The International 2016 is the premier tournament for what is arguably the world's most popular online multiplayer battle game - Dota 2. The follow up to to Blizzard's Defence of the Ancients (Dota), Dota 2 has comfortably left its predecessor in the dust.
Two months before its official release, Dota 2 was already seeing upwards of 300,000 concurrent players. Today, on the Steam platform, Dota 2 frequently sees over 1 million users on the game at the same time, almost double the number of concurrent users of the next highest played game - Counter Strike: Global Offensive.
With a dedicated user base like this, it's no surprise that Dota 2's biggest tournament is really serious business. Serious enough to not only sell out stadiums, but also with prize money that makes actual sporting tournament prize money look like food stamps.
For comparison, the entire prize prize pool for the last Cricket World Cup stood at $10.25 million. The prize pool for the Augusta Masters, one of golf's most lucrative tournaments stands at $10 million. The cash cow that is the IPL has a total of $6.3 million on offer.
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The International 2016 prize pool on the other hand stood at a whopping $20.7 million, double that of the Cricket World Cup and Augusta. More than triple that of the IPL.
This year's winner, Chinese team Wings Gaming, took home a cool $10 million in prize money between the 5 of them.
What's even more amazing is that the base prize pool of the event is only $1.6 million. The rest of it is crowdsourced by Dota 2 in-game sales. This raised the prize pool for 2016 by almost 1200%.
The world cup of Dota 2
Dota 2 is not the first e-Sport to offer over a million dollars in prize money. Starcraft, another wildly popular game, also has massive tournaments. The difference between Starcraft and Dota 2 though, is that the former was a more localised phenomenon, whereas Dota 2 is truly global.
While Starcraft is massive in Asia with all the major tournaments taking place in South Korea, Japan and China, Dota 2 is so popular worldwide that different regions have their own qualifying leagues for The International.
For the purposes of qualifying, the four regions are the Americas, Europe, China and Southeast Asia. In each of these regions, thousands of teams battle it out to make the finals. Only the winners and runners-up of these regions make it through to the finals, where they compete along with 6 invited teams%2
First published: 17 August 2016, 14:02 IST
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