The major esports tournament The International is one of the highlights of the year for many players of Dota 2 (Steam). But many fans who wanted to watch the event live in Singapore came away empty-handed. Scalpers bought up the tickets and are now selling them at extremely high prices.
This is The International: The Dota 2 tournament first took place in 2011 and has been one of the biggest esports events of the year ever since. The best DOTA-2 teams in the world compete there to secure the world championship and the often hefty prize money.
The International 2021 was held in Romania and the prize pool was over $40 million in that event. This year, it’s off to Singapore for organizer Valve, the esports teams, and the fans.
To see the event live on site, some fans had to dig deep into their pockets:
- Those who wanted to see all the playoffs live were allowed to pay about $254 ($63 per day)
- If you wanted to see the finals, you had to pay an additional $360 for a ticket.
On top of that, there were the costs of travel to Singapore, accommodation and meals. But even those who wanted to spend that much, ticket sales easily turned into a big disappointment.
“Not one chance to get a ticket”
Here’s the problem: Sales of coveted tickets for The International 2022 began on August 13 and ended just minutes after they went on sale. However, a good portion of the tickets went to scalpers rather than interested fans and appeared on resale sites like Carousell only a short time later.
Prices for individual tickets go up to $10,000.
Prices for individual tickets skyrocketed and were in some cases 25x higher than the original prices. Especially the coveted access to the final of the e-sports highlight was sold for a lot of money and the prices were up to $10,000 per ticket.
The frustrated fans vented their anger on reddit and social media:
- “I’m really disappointed. This was the closest The International has been to Australia so far.” – juggernautomnislash
- “A line of 2,800, click on Oct 22, then pick 2 tickets. 3 seconds later it was sold out.” – erickchoiii
- “Fuck it. I may be from Singapore, but I’m not going to crawl to the scalpers for this stuff.” – mantism
Some users told that they wanted to travel with friends and only one or two people from the group could get a ticket. Others had already booked their flights and then came away empty-handed at the sale.
The ticket sale for The International joins the long list of scalping incidents within gaming. In addition to the PS5 and new RTX graphics cards, which were massively sold off by bots and sold on eBay, various collector’s editions of popular games like Elden Ring, FFXIV: Endwalker or Horizon Forbidden West also fell victim to scalpers.
Any of you guys maybe interested in seeing The International live in Singapore? Have you had any luck with a ticket? Drop us a line in the comments.
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