The esports world descended on Seattle this past weekend for this year’s International, the final tournament on the professional circuit for Valve Software’s popular multiplayer online battle arena Dota 2.
This was the 12th year for the International, and the first show since 2017 to be held in Valve’s home state of Washington. After two weekends’ worth of qualifying matches, held at the Seattle Convention Center’s Summit building, the top eight for this year’s International was held Oct. 27-29.
I’ve dabbled in a couple of other MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), such as Dota 2’s primary competitor League of Legends and Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm, but never tried out Dota 2. All I’d really known about it before last weekend is that it has a famously devoted fanbase.
Enough of those fans showed up for the International to fill roughly 75% of the Climate Pledge Arena, despite a steep price tag; a three-day ticket for the finals cost $699 through Ticketmaster.
In fairness, you don’t come away from the International empty-handed. Entry entitled attendees to a swag bag that contained an enamel pin, a Dota 2 toy figurine, and a special badge with a QR code that added an exclusive Dota 2 lootbox to your Steam inventory. At time of writing, resellers on the Steam Marketplace were trading that lootbox for roughly $170 in Steam Wallet money.
A shocking number of attendees had flown into Seattle specifically for the International. I spoke to Dota 2 fans at the show from China, Russia, and Singapore, and there was a rumor going around about a guy from Dubai who’d only come into town to buy (and immediately resell) all the event-exclusive Dota 2 merchandise.
It had an unusual atmosphere for a video game tournament. The fans and enthusiasm were absolutely there, but there wasn’t anywhere near the degree of hype that I’ve grown to expect out of an e-sports event.
I don’t know Dota 2, but I do follow a few other games’ pro circuits. Typically, the sole unifying factor between different e-sports is that they’re always actively engaged in trying to grow the scene. For example, if you watch a Street Fighter tournament on Twitch, it’ll run ads between matches to promote gear, games, and goods that all feed back into playing more Street Fighter.
The International, conversely, seems to operate on the assumption that if you’re there, you already bought in. The arena was redecorated with Dota 2 themes and a couple of PC-gaming companies like SteelSeries had booths set up on the outskirts of the Arena’s main concourse, but it almost felt perfunctory. Half the restaurants in the venue were closed and many Seattle Kraken signs were still up (the NHL season just began).
Compared to other tournaments I’ve attended, it created the impression that the International, almost uniquely, has no interest in self-promotion. Instead, it’s a pure celebration of this shared, weird hobby, complete with cosplay contests, fan videos, and hundreds of bizarre in-jokes in and out of the crowd. This wasn’t an event to draw new people in. it was entirely for the people who were already there.
The competition
The champions at this year’s International, the Belgrade-based Team Spirit, took the tournament with a 3-0 victory over the EU’s Gaimin Gladiators. The GG had fought tooth and nail to make it that far, starting from the losers’ bracket on Oct. 27, but simply crumbled in the final match.
Team Spirit is made up of some of the best Dota 2 players in the world, and by virtue of having gone undefeated up to that point, had nearly a full day’s rest before the grand finals. It was a decisive victory.
Watching the International as a novice, it does highlight Dota 2’s comparative inaccessibility. Eleven years after its debut, with over 120 playable characters, Dota 2 is dense; it rewards cooperation, practice, strategic thinking, and quick decision-making.
More than one match I watched this weekend was won or lost on the back of a single choice, which was made at a random point within a 30- to 60-minute round. It’s an exhausting game to watch and try to comprehend, let alone play.
MOBAs in general are a weird hybrid genre, which can be difficult to explain to anyone who isn’t already hip-deep in video games. They originated with Defense of the Ancients, a player-created mod for the 2002 real-time strategy game Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. Instead of generating and controlling armies, DOTA put the player in control of single “hero units” for a more focused, team-based game.
DOTA’s popularity led to it becoming an e-sport in its own right, independently of Warcraft III. In 2009, several fans of DOTA at Valve Software teamed with one of the mod’s original developers, who’s still officially known only by the pseudonym Icefrog, to create a sequel.
They proceeded to file off all the original mod’s serial numbers – this is why several heroes in Dota 2 are visibly store-brand versions of various Warcraft characters, i.e. the Crystal Maiden and Jaina Proudmoore – and released it as a standalone product in 2012. DOTA is an acronym; Dota 2, for branding/copyright reasons, is not.
Since then, Dota 2 has risen to become one of the most consistently popular games on Steam, averaging roughly 660,000 simultaneous players on any given day in the last decade. In terms of the larger market, Dota 2 is a blip; its primary competitor League of Legends has millions more players and, given the recent success of transmedia adaptations like Netflix’s Arcane, more cultural visibility.
What Dota 2 has by comparison is sheer devotion. League is big business, but Dota 2 is a cult favorite, and like Valve’s other multiplayer games, a tentpole franchise for Steam as a platform. As per independent data trackers, Dota 2 has not dropped below 590,000 simultaneous players on Steam at any point in the last ten years.
The cash
This year’s International did represent a notable step backwards for the show. Traditionally, the International has boasted some of the highest prize pools of any e-sports circuit, which is largely funded through players purchasing downloadable content for Dota 2.
The International made headlines in 2021 when its total prize pool broke the $40 million mark, which was made off the back of Dota 2’s popular Battle Pass. This remains the single largest pot for any tournament in the young history of e-sports.
Further, if you look at the top 10 highest prize pools in e-sports history, seven of them are from various Internationals. As an e-sport, this makes Dota 2 a complete outlier. It’s always been massively community-supported, and it’s always been much more valuable to its competitors than its prominence in the gaming scene would suggest. Even billion-dollar franchises like Fortnite have not traditionally offered prizes the way Dota 2 does.
The 2023 show told a very different story, however. This year, Valve announced a new DLC, the Compendium, to fund the International’s prize pool. This offered significantly less attractive bonuses for the end user than previous years’ Battle Passes, most of which revolve around tricking out a player’s profile, and was only made available a month before the International started.
As a result, this year’s prize pool “only” cracked $3 million, with roughly 45.5% of that going to the winners. It’s a baffling decision, particularly in conjunction with the $700 tickets. Several people I talked to this weekend were wondering if Valve, in some kind of scheme that recalls Mel Brooks’ The Producers, is actively trying to wind Dota 2 down.
If that’s the case, then Valve might be out of luck. Dota 2 turned 11 in July, and it’s got one of the most consistent audiences in modern video games. It’s not a breakout success by industry standards, but it’s still got a few million fans who’re willing to come hundreds of miles and spend hundreds of dollars to celebrate the community. If anything, this year’s International served to highlight just how much of Dota 2, in 2023, belongs exclusively to the people who play it.
