Another year, another sold out The International. That doesn’t mean fans will be in the seats though, as TI11 proved very popular for ticket resellers and scalpers.
Tickets to The International 2022 went on sale on August 13 and seats were sold out in less than an hour. Fans have been scrambling to find a way to see the top Dota 2 action live but are met with incredible markups from ticket resellers.
What’s causing the huge markups? Part of it is bot-driven purchases. Scalpers wait in the virtual ticket queues to grab as many TI11 tickets as they can with the goal to sell out the event, forcing fans to purchase their tickets on reselling sites. Due to the limited availability, desperate fans will be forced to pay absurd prices if they want a chance at watching the large esports event in person.
TI11 tickets ran very high, but some listings for resellers have tickets going for over $2,200.
Scalping has become a huge issue with The International over the last few years. Fans from around the world will often stay up to get tickets, waiting in queues nearly 20,000 people long. The Suntec Arena‘s capacity is only 6,000 so it’s no wonder fans are in a rush to get the tickets first and are willing to even pay the inflated prices on resell sites.
The event is technically sold out at this point, but many of those tickets don’t actually have owners yet. Scalpers purchased tickets in hopes of making the event sell out faster so they can get more money for their bulk-ordered tickets. Some fans are forced to pay the monstrous prices since they have already booked plane tickets to the event.
This ongoing dilemma has been brought up to Valve in the past but the company has never addressed the problem. There isn’t necessarily much the company can do either, as this is a major issue for sports fans of any kind when big matches come around.
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