Some stats on the dota2 geography in China

While making a comment on the stagnancy of dota2 in China and the lack of new players, I got curious about the point and went out to look for data to confirm my thoughts. I ended up finding some interesting data which I thought I should share.

 

http://i.imgur.com/iI7GRAQ.png?1

This is the user geography data obtained from http://steamspy.com/app/570. From here you can see that China is less than half the size of Russia and about equal to US+Canada in terms of player numbers. I didn't add up the EU countries (you can access the numbers in the country tab) because you can get a rough idea in the next graph.

http://i.imgur.com/HmQojLA.png?1

This image is taken from https://rjackson.me/tools/mmstats/, which tracks the number of players queuing for each server at any given time. Sadly there is no data on average queuing time so the data is not so reliable. Anyway, from here you can see that China has a very short window of activity compared to every other major region, with a peak of only 6 hours which coincided with primetime in China. This suggests that a larger portion of the player base are day job workers compared to other regions. This is just the numbers for one day though, you can go to the website and scroll around to see data for other days and other servers, they don't all look like this.

 

The above data somewhat confirms my observations; Most of the Chinese dota2 player base are older players that migrated from dota1, and all the new players went to LoL. As these guys gradually work themselves into busier jobs and older age the user base will stagnate or even decline, unless custom games really take off.

 


Perfectworld as a company is just no match for Tecent, who holds a huge user group and has massive natural advertising advantages as it has its own popular news site and instant messaging services. They were able to completely shut down dota2's exposure to new gamers. In fact, the recent reborn update barely made a splash to the Chinese LoL player base as the LoL forum mods are connected to Tecent and shut out all the news in their forums.

 

As for the pro scene, China has always boasted about 4 tier-1 teams ever since TI2, when the PW servers opened and dota1 pros migrated over. Since then there hasn't been that many new blood breakthroughs, especially in the last year where a large number of tier2 players like June, Injuly, Lin, Inflame etc. got their shots at tier1 teams and ultimately failing. They hosted a reality show designed to find hidden pub talents like Arteezy and Sumail last year, and the best they could find are tier2-3 guys like Exbingo. As these dota1 vets retire I suspect that there won't be enough new talents to sustain 4 tier1 teams (in fact they are already down to 3) and we will see China decline to 1 to 2 tier1 teams over the next few years.