Dota 2 record
Largest prize pool
The International 2021 raised $40,018,195 — a record for the game, and for esports as a whole at the time. Over ten years the pool grew 25-fold from the first event; over the next five it fell by 90.2%.
- sample
- the announced tournament pool
Dota 2 record “Largest prize pool”: $40,018,195 at the peak. The International 2021 raised $40,018,195 — a record for the game, and for esports as a whole at the time. Over ten years the pool grew 25-fold from the first event; over the next five it fell by 90.2%. Among 15 editions of The International; sample: the announced tournament pool. Sqady, https://sqady.com/dota2/records/ti-prize-pools/
every edition by year
the announced tournament pool, not the paid one: the split by placement is on each tournament page
what happened to the money
The pool beat its own record 8 editions running, from 2013 to 2021: every event raised more than the standing record. The 5 editions since have not come close.
Until 2023 the pool was crowdfunded: Valve sold the Compendium, later the Battle Pass, and a share of sales went into the prize. The mechanism worked as a flywheel — the bigger the event, the more people bought, the bigger the pool.
In 2023 Valve dropped the Battle Pass and the pool fell from $18,930,775 to $3,380,455 — 6 times smaller in a single year. It has stayed near three million since: $3,906,263 in 2026.
This is the one record on the site that will not be broken by ordinary growth: the mechanism that produced it was ended by the publisher itself.
This is the announced prize pool of the tournament, not the amount actually paid out to teams, and not any single club’s earnings for a year. The split by placement is on each tournament page.
Facts and records
$34,330,068
second-largest pool
The International 2019
The record event, The International 2021, was won by Team Spirit, which also holds the most The International titles: 3. The second-largest pool was at The International 2019: $34,330,068, won by OG.
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From $1.6 million at each of the first two events, The International’s prize pool grew at every edition up to $40 million in Bucharest in 2021 — twenty-five times the starting point. The biggest single jump came in 2014, when the pool almost quadrupled in a year, from $2.9 million to $10.9 million.
The fall was faster than the rise. In 2022 the pool more than halved, and in 2023 it dropped to $3.4 million. The low point so far is 2024 in Copenhagen at $2.8 million, below even the 2013 edition. Since then it has grown two years running, and the 2026 edition in Shanghai, at about $3.9 million, was the largest since 2022.
Seattle is the city most closely tied to the event: it hosted seven editions, every year from 2012 to 2017 and again in 2023. The only other city to host twice is Shanghai, in 2019 and 2026.