PGL Wallachia Season 1 Sets Record Concurrent Viewership

The PGL Wallachia Season 1 concluded on May 19 at the PGL Studios in Bucharest, Romania, after approximately ten days of intense action. As a new addition to Dota 2's esports calendar, it started strong by attracting nearly 490K peak viewers and revealed some interesting language dynamics, which will be discussed below.

After coming through six regional qualifiers, some of the world's best Dota 2 teams competed across two stages for a total prize pool of $1M, with the winner taking home $300K. Ultimately, Team Spirit defeated Xtreme Gaming 3:2 in a closely contested match to become the inaugural champions of the series.

PGL Wallachia Season 1 — Viewership Stats and Most Popular Games

The PGL Wallachia Season 1 reached 487.4K peak viewers during the Grand Final between the reigning world champion and the Saudi Arabian team aiming to establish itself on the global stage. It also achieved 14.8M hours watched and averaged 130K viewers over 114 hours of airtime, marking a highly successful debut for the organizer.

The tournament winner's impressive performances significantly contributed to these large numbers, with the esports organization appearing in all five of the most popular games. In fact, two of its matches against the runner-up made this leaderboard, with the sole Group Stage encounter coming from its all-Russian clash with BetBoom Team.

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PGL Wallachia Season 1 — Most Popular Teams

It was a close race for the most popular team by average online viewers, but one team edged out the competition by about 2.5K concurrent viewers. Nevertheless, the audience support for the esports organizations featured here will please PGL, which will host this series — involving teams from Western Europe, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, North America, China, and South America — until 2026.

An analysis of the group stage matches showed that English and Russian experienced a reversal in fortunes compared to ESL One Birmingham 2024. This trend continued in the Playoffs, resulting in a more than 13.5% increase in watch time for Russian, while English saw its share fall by almost 8%.

PGL Wallachia Season 1 — Top Channels

Most notably, with an extra team representing the country, Russia saw a 125% increase in peak concurrent viewership compared to the England Dota 2 competition. One factor contributing to this spike was the increase in the number of channels live-streaming and following the action. Specifically, a prominent figure in the Russian Dota 2 content creation community, rostislav_999, brought many new viewers to this competition, becoming the most popular co-caster.

Conversely, although the number of English channels also slightly increased, its figures suffered due to the lack of a representative team reaching the later rounds. Team Liquid was the best-performing team, reaching the Lower Bracket Quarterfinals before losing to another Chinese team, G2.iG.

Most Popular Dota 2 Tournaments Since 2023

The PGL Wallachia Season 1 also became the most popular Dota 2 tournament of 2024 so far, outperforming the next-best entry by 35%. It also had 48.4% more peak viewers than the Birmingham event despite being behind at the end of the Group Stage, indicating that fan interest increased due to the quality of the action and the teams competing in the Playoffs.

Most Popular Dota 2 Competitions in 2024

It also became the fifth most popular tournament in the discipline since 2023, achieving higher peak viewership figures than The Bali Major 2023, the four DreamLeague competitions, and ESL One Kuala Lumpur 2023. The potential for even larger numbers had teams like Gaimin Gladiators, BB Team, and Virtus.pro reaching the Playoffs, which bodes well for the series and the rest of the year, especially with the Esports World Cup coming up.