The premiere of Valve’s True Sight: The International 2019 Dota 2 documentary was a mix of the full film live and a Q&A with the two teams that were the focus of the entire project.
And while the numbers for the premiere did spike compared to the TI8 documentary, the true showing came when the video went live on YouTube as the combination of Twitch, SteamTV, and YouTube viewers pushed the film over 1 million viewers within the first day.
Starting with the premiere, fans could watch the film’s first showing live with chat along with the OG and Nigma Q&A panel on either Twitch or SteamTV. That didn’t do much to split the viewership as Twitch had a peak of 111,061 people watching the documentary, but there was a surprising number of people watching through SteamTV, with 43,906 viewers tuning in through the launcher.
According to Esports Charts, that puts the premiere viewership at 154,967, which is nearly a 30,000-viewer increase from True Sight TI8’s 127,936 (93,955 on Twitch and 33,981 on SteamTV).
But the real numbers came immediately after the stream ended and the film went live on the official Dota 2 YouTube channel. That channel alone has nearly 730,000 subscribers, and within the first few hours of the video being up, it broke 500,000 views.
That number continued to climb throughout the day as fans watched the video again and new viewers got to enjoy it for the first time. Just the premiere and video alone broke 1 million views within the first day easily.
As of now, the official video has over 2 million views and the vod on Twitch that includes the Q&A and interviews with both OG and Nigma has an additional 59,000. And that total does not include the clips of the best Q&A answers or OG announcing Syed “SumaiL” Hassan was joining the team, which each have thousands of views too.
Valve also released a second version of the documentary that features OG and Nigma reacting to the film together in a theatre. That version provides personal context to each conversation, decision, and play that happened during the TI9 finals through live commentary from some of the best players to ever play Dota.
The “Player Reaction” video has 850,000 after having almost been up for a full day, and will likely eclipse one million soon.
Overall, the TI9 iteration of True Sight was a massive success despite switching up the formula a bit to focus on a pair of teams and one specific series rather than one journey through the biggest tournament in Dota. The directors have also teased that a blooper reel might be released in the coming months, so there is more content for fans to potentially look forward to.
