The big Esport tournament The International is one of the highlights of the year for many players of Dota 2 (Steam). However, 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 since become one of the largest Esport events of the year. The best DOTA 2 teams in the world compete against each other to secure the world championship and often hefty prize money.
The International 2021 took place in Romania and the prize pool was over 40 million dollars. This year, the organizer Valve, the Esport teams, and the fans are heading to Singapore.
To see the event live on site, some fans had to dig deep into their pockets:
- For those wanting to see all playoffs live, about $254 (63 $ per day) had to be paid.
- For those wanting to experience the final on top of that, an additional $360 had to be laid down for a ticket.
On top of that were the costs for travel to Singapore, accommodation, and meals. But even for those willing to spend that much, ticket sales became a major disappointment.
“Not a chance for a ticket”
Here’s the problem: The sale of the coveted tickets for The International 2022 began on August 13 and ended just a few minutes after the start. A good portion of the tickets, however, went not to interested fans, but to scalpers and appeared shortly afterward on resale sites like Carousell.
The prices for individual tickets skyrocketed and were sometimes 25 times higher than the original prices. Especially the coveted access to the finale of the E-Sport highlight was sold for a lot of money, with prices reaching up to $10,000 per ticket.
Frustrated fans expressed their anger on Reddit and social media:
- “I’m really disappointed. This was the International that was closest to Australia so far.” – juggernautomnislash
- “A queue of 2,800. Click on October 22, then select 2 tickets. 3 seconds later it was sold out.” – erickchoiii
- “Screw that. I may be from Singapore, but I’m not going to crawl to the scalpers for this stuff.” – mantism
Some users mentioned 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 during the sale.
The ticket sale for The International thus joins the now long list of scalping incidents within gaming. Besides the PS5 and new RTX graphics cards, which were massively bought out by bots during their release 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.
Does anyone of you perhaps have an interest in seeing The International live in Singapore? Did you have any luck with a ticket? Let us know in the comments.
