Dota 2: Black Market Merchants Take Advantage of One of Esports Highlights of the Year: “Not a Chance of a Ticket”

The big esports tournament The International is one of the highlights of the year for many Dota 2 (Steam) players. But many fans who wanted to watch the event live in Singapore went away empty-handed. Scalpers bought 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 biggest esports events of the year. The best DOTA 2 teams in the world compete there to secure the world championship and the often hefty prize money.

International 2021 was held in Russia and the prize pool was over $40 million. This year the event organizer Valve, the esports teams and the fans are going to Singapore.

Some fans had to dig deep into their pockets to see the event live on site:

• Anyone who wanted to watch all playoffs live was allowed to pay around $254 ($63 per day)
• If you wanted to see the finale on top of that, you had to pay an additional $360 for a ticket.

Added to this were the costs of travel to Singapore, accommodation and meals. But even for those who wanted to spend that much, ticket sales easily became a big disappointment.

“Not a Chance of a Ticket”

That’s the problem: The sale of the coveted tickets for The International 2022 began on August 13 and ended just minutes after the start. However, a good part of the tickets did not go to interested fans, but to scalpers and only a short time later appeared on resale sites such as carousel.

The prices for individual tickets skyrocketed and were sometimes 25 times higher than the original prices. In particular, the coveted access to the finals of the e-sports highlight sold for a lot of money, with prices reaching up to $10,000 per ticket.

The frustrated fans vented their anger on reddit and social media:

• “I am really disappointed. That was the closest The International has ever been to Australia.” – juggerautomnislash
• “A queue of 2,800. Click on October 22, then choose 2 tickets. 3 seconds later it was sold out.” – erickchoiii
• “Fuck it all. I may be from Singapore, but I won’t crawl to the scalpers for that stuff.” – mantism

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Some users reported 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 were then sold nothing.

The ticket sale for The International thus joins the now long list of scalping incidents within gaming. In addition to the PS5 and new RTX graphics cards, which were bought off massively by bots and sold on eBay at the time of release, various Collector’s Editions of popular games such as Elden Ring, FFXIV: Endwalker or Horizon Forbidden West also fell victim to scalpers.

Any of you interested in seeing The International live in Singapore? Any luck with a ticket? Tell us in the comments.