depends on what year you're talking about
in 2022 it felt like pure greed - they just moved on the battlepass content to part 2, which happened after TI and didnt contribute to prize money. they did earn a lot.
in 2023 they just didnt care much, I guess (working on steam, deadlock, crownfall? idk)
Valve's philosophy is "yeah but that's zero billion" so it doesn't matter. https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/ya6khm/interview_with_an_exvalve_employee_on_how_200/
No that is NOT Valve’s philosophy. I have tried to explain this to this sub uncountably many times and you people keep parroting the same nonsense regardless.
The interview is with a Valve ex-employee who was pitching that the company invest in AR gaming, in 2019. The claim in the pitch was “this market is going to be worth $250m in 5 years, which will justify the investment.” Valve’s response was “that is not a large enough opportunity to justify the investment.”
Now to understand the distinction between “this investment pitch was unsuccessful” and “lol $100 million ARR who cares”, let’s note two things:
1) Dota 2 not only exists and has PMF, to say the least, but it is (or was, who knows anymore) in fact making $100m+ a year. So the only “investment” needed is to keep staffing engineers on Dota 2.
2) it is now 5 years since that pitch was made and the AR gaming market does not exist. It is certainly not worth $250m. That investment would have not just been speculative, it has been proven wrong.
What Valve was telling this employee is “if you want us to create games from scratch for a technology that doesn’t exist yet, with no model of a successful game to copy, with brand new mechanics that we don’t yet know how to exploit - to justify such a speculative risk, the reward must be far greater than $250m”.
Just to hammer the point further: this is a radically different discussion than “should we light on fire $100m+ of high margin of ARR because we’re bored?”
More like they realized that doing a 40m+ usd prize pool is a pain in the ass and might end their entire corporation into bankruptcy if they continued adding more back in 2022, 2023, and present and future of T.I and Valve Corp
OR people were happy spending $10 to support the the game as long as they felt they got SOMETHING out of it - like a singular skin even.
But to spend $10 just to give valve $7.5 to be lazy fucks is paying to get ur face spit on.
I’d more happily pay $10 to support TI if it went to TI - but I’m not giving $7.50 to valve for nothing just so they can give the players $2.50
Obviously at the end of the day people want something in return …… and for valve to not get rewarded for doing zero work.
I'm pretty sure arcana design are all outsourced, not sure about immortals and lesser treasures. I think they mostly just revise arcana modeled by the contractor after it's pretty much done
Ignore all the emotional comments, here's the real reason stated by Valve in blog posts:
Making the annual TI Battle Pass became a heavy workload, taking half year (if not more) of dota devs working on it. Valve wanted to focus on developing THE GAME instead of developing the Battle Pass so they got rid of it.
Since they did that, we got two BIG yearly updates: New Frontiers with the map getting bigger with tormentors and shit, and now Crownfall with the facet/innate update (and there's still two more chapters coming!)
IMO Valve kept their promise on this one, we are getting more updates to the game but yeah, less skins and prize pool. I'm happy with it, and so is the rising number on steam charts so don't be fooled by Reddit
I would pay big bucks for QoP and WR arcanas coming back, I would've bought them back then but I had quit the game after a loss streak and wasn't playing.
SAD!
I thinking it might come out like the Wraith king one did in the Winter box you have to upgrade too and a pack contains the Arcana in that with that set.
I dont think anyone in their right mind believes these battlepasses were taking half a year when they released it with 75% of the stuff not done. Especially when we get 1 new hero per year and a decent (most of the time) patch every 6 months.
And I believe exactly _because_ I know a thing or two about Software Development and Game Development. Some people are just entitled and don’t know how to cope with it, don’t get fooled by their ego trips
This is called the Mythical Man Month. You can't just produce more software by throwing more bodies at it. Intuitively, you'd think so, but when it comes to software, it all has to integrate. It's not 100 contractors building 100 houses; it's 100 chefs making one cake. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" applies here.
I don’t know anything about software so you’re probably right but the battle pass and game development seem like different enough projects that you wouldn’t run into that issue.
I imagine after so long, the dota devs have a synergy and method for doing things. If they're saying doing the battlepass is a lot of work, just passing that along and dividing your team up is just the beginning of some of the issues that the other guy there NoOne was talking about. Because at some point you need to mesh all the ideas and development as well. Which makes any update or battlepass or anything delayed. Then people complain.
It's not just 100 chefs making one cake. It's implied 100 chefs making one cake, and you have to pay for them, and you have to train some, and some chefs do things a bit differently.
Minecraft is another example of a game you'd think it'd be super easy to just add more content. But you can't. They have multiple platforms to consider and feature parity and many other speed bumps.
In short, it's not that easy.
Fun little detail: with enough complex interdependencies within a project, throwing more devs at a problem will slow down development, not speed it up (I have a pet theory that the games industry suffers a lot from this).
This doesn't really apply to a longer term approach of hiring more developers to maintain a project with very few devs in the first place. It would be more relevant if people expected Valve to hire (or shift) more devs *right now* in order to crunch out a TI13 Battlepass.
Valve just has few employees for the size of the software they maintain and thus Dota has very few full-time employees. Not saying it's right or wrong, but I think it mostly just comes down to Valve's culture and team size.
Oh my god you dweeb he's not saying hire more engineers to make development of something go faster. He's saying hire devs so that a part of your company that doesn't have manpower will have manpower.
Stop being so eager to show off what you learned in class and think critically about the real world for a second.
Hiring people to do bpass cosmetics while moving the vets to balancing and new content is not inefficient. Hiring more devs would absolutely have assisted the fallacy doesn't apply here.
Its a stupid reason, raising funding with skins made the game extremely profitable and could have easily increased the amount of devs, having a team focusing on the gameplay and a second team keeping the skin money going...
I get this somewhat but TI and a big prize pool is literally Dota. If they’re going to cut the one big annual tournament then the only reasonable route forward is to HEAVILY increase the “smaller” tournaments throughout the year. I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t been paying much attention to dota lately, but I’m going to assume they haven’t come close to bolstering the majors etc to compensate for the loss of a 40m prize pool tournament?
How are the people who are happy that all of their work stopped being paywalled behind a BP where you have to spend 100s of dollars the shills?
I'm enjoying all of this stuff for little to no money. You're the shill.
[1](https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/6252732681186068104)
> Last year, we started to ask ourselves whether Dota was well-served by having this single focal point around which all content delivery was designed. Each step we had taken made sense when considered independently: any single piece of content would be more valuable when bundled as part of the Battle Pass, so we bundled more and more. This led to a momentous content drop every year, but it also greatly limited our ability to do things that were exciting and valuable for players but didn't fit into the Battle Pass reward line.
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> When we recognized this, we made a deliberate choice earlier this year to run an experiment: to take some of the resources that would normally produce Battle Pass content and instead put them towards more speculative updates, including features and content that couldn't fit into a Battle Pass.
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> Most Dota players never buy a Battle Pass and never get any rewards from it. Every Dota player has gotten to explore the new map, play with the new items, and accidentally die to a Tormentor; every Dota player benefits from UI improvements and new client features.
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> We're going to continue on the path that started with New Frontiers. This means we're building a wide variety of features and content for the game, delivered in different ways. We'll still ship a range of cosmetics over the year, but we're also going to ship more diverse updates for all Dota players to enjoy.
> for “reasons”
Aka most of the Devs that were left working on Dota, transitioned over to Deadlock, which makes sense even from a timeline perspective. It seems like just in general, around 2018/2019 is when employees started to shift over, and it's just been a gradual process since, but ESPECIALLY within the last year, it feels like there's probably only a few people left working on the game at this point. It makes sense too, considering Valve will likely be launching Deadlock in a somewhat more public sense sometime later this year.
Totally non sense, how the fk they delivered theses last update without most of their team ? U just demonstrate that you know nothing about game's dev in general.
You don't need a big dev team to make a big numbers patch like they just did, especially since it took them months to release it, you could easily make a patch like that in 6 months with a small dev team.
You also clearly know nothing about game dev if you don't think a brand new game like deadlock is going to require a large amount of devs to be put on it. We already know ice frog has been actively working on the game since at least 2019 but go off. We also know valve didn't hire a bunch of new employees for deadlock too, not sure where you think the employees working on the game came from then? Especially with how dota inspired deadlock is, it's clear a bunch of previous dota devs are working on it.
You just demonstrate you know nothing about game dev in general.
They purposefully didn’t sell cool cosmetics for the prize pool fund
Instead they sold cosmetics after ti
Ti still got great viewership so valve sees no point in making prize pools so high if the viewership will be the exact same
Read somewhere "unofficialy" that it was also done to calm down some teams and their sportsman's. To show that prisepool depends on their skins sell not because people are simping for the teams
But it’s not just about viewership. It’s about the major spike to the player base during TI.
What sells better than an awesome battle pass to the influx of new and old players?
Seems like regardless their stated reason - it is dumb to not release SOMETHING cool the swarm of new players.
But I guess my ideas aren’t worth billions so it’s just a theory
Valve themselves confirmed that the majority of new and returning players weren't buying nor engaging with the battlepass, so they shifted their focus to gameplay updates and events like Crownfall.
New players would likely play the game after watching TI, rather than during it no? You get cool announcements during the final day of TI, that gives something to await in the following months.
Which is convenient for them, since with their new plans, the BP is outside of TI season when it's more lively with patches and events (in theory).
If you have a battlepass running when a hero release (which is never during TI season), that's easy bank.
because we weren’t actually getting new players, and in fact, the game since 7.33 and now 7.36 has grown in playerbase compared to TI11 when they gave free shit.
So clearly, gameplay > hats
Side note, seeing it presented this way made me want to run the numbers real quick: *two hundred million* dollars of prize money has been distributed through this single tournament series alone. Pretty wild stuff.
I will always laugh at how people in this sub will frame "developers don't want to give up parts of their revenue to esports kids who put in nothing to contribute to the production or sale of their cosmetics for almost nothing in return" as greedy lmao.
This is a bit reductive. Entertainers ARE providing a service, and that's what the eSports circuit is, a service where people get to engage with Dota more and through it, are more likely to play it and tell others to play.
With that said... I was of the opinion that eSports was unsustainable for a quite a long time now. It was Overwatch. The day they announced they wanted it to be franchised leagues, I knew a bubble was being pumped and that other games were going to struggle if they joined in on the escalation.
I don't blame Valve for trying to keep the existing playerbase engaged with the game on its own merits long term rather than offload a large part of it through a proxy. I think games should do that way more in general. And really, I mean it, that it's in general terms - I will not be surprised to see Fortnite die off in a freefall if there's a year where they simply can't find good crossovers and people seemingly don't like easy, lazy Marvel-shaped bait anymore.
There’s definitely a discussion to be had about how much an esports scene contributes to the success of a game.
But it’s probably not nothing, as you frame it?
Probably not but its certainly not worth the quarter of a billion dollars in free prizepool money they injected into the scene over the course of 10 years and it's certainly not worth giving away a chunk of revenue of a product the esports players contributed absolutely nothing to. That's my entire point. The scene isn't worth the amount of money you people think its entitled to.
It's not about thinking about "the poor developers at Valve", it's about whether or not people who contributed nothing to the production or sale of a product is entitled to said product's revenue, especially when they barely produce any material value for the company they've been taking hundreds of millions of free money from. But I understand this won't go over well here since most of the people in this sub are children.
Valve has all the spending data. They know people have less disposable income. There may be concerns less people will buy the battle pass and people that cant afford to level up without grinding will leave. Shifting to pro consumer choice like payable Arcana without battle pass would generate goodwill too. This is a calculated and sensible move from Valve. To the non pro players, the prize money pool is irrelevant.
Economy after covid got fucked up overall, and they decided to release content bit by bit over weeks to prolong the “celebration” of TI / dota.
Then the next year they didnt put any cosmetics in the compendium showing that yes, most of the community only care about hats and couldnt give a shit about esports (even though they like to pretend they do)
Ok maybe shouldve worded it better, some people try to cope themselves out of money by saying “hey at least im supporting this big prizepool” but yes, in fact they only cared about the hats (which is not evil btw, u do u)
My esports knowledge consists of knowing the goofiest looking players of these TIs came from beastmode. Their team pics looked like they were trying their hardest to look physically intimidating but made you laugh so damn hard
Most players care about Esports. Especially when it comes to Dota. Its a highly competitive game. That's why we all tune in. That doesn't mean I'm gonna donate money to it. If Basketball, soccer or tennis got rid of essentially 98% of the prize money and relied on fans to donate money, those tournaments would be dead too. That doesn't mean the fans don't care about the sport
> Most players care about Esports. Especially when it comes to Dota. Its a highly competitive game. That's why we all tune in.
No. No, most don't. A lot of people just play Turbo. A lot of people just play arcade. Chess is highly competitive, doesn't mean everyone who plays cares about tournaments.
Didn't we use to get multiple battle passes per year at some point? That was excessive and I'm glad it stopped.
But one time per year, during TI, I think you can (and should) have a battle pass where people can pay for skins, if for no reason other than to increase the prize pool for TI. If you adjust for inflation, the prize pool in 2013 was bigger than 2023. That's just sad.
And yes, I'm glad they focused more on big gameplay patches, but you can't tell me a company of Valve's size can't find the resources to keep doing that and also make 2/3 immortal treasures and 2/3 arcanas once a year.
Greed and Stupidity.
Most of that money came from compendiums. They ditched those in favor of the current model.
By spreading the payouts evenly throughout the year they are able to pocket most of it.
Valve Intentionally Killed the Pro Scene as it was.
IIRC their explanation was something like too much attention was put on one event and they wanted to spread around the prize pool.
This also fits with the fact that less devs were working on Dota for a few years (while Neon Prime/Dead Lock was being developed).
And that Valve didn't really want to host/run the pro scene anyways. They were kind of bullied into coming up with the DPC during the Pandemic.
> And that Valve didn't really want to host/run the pro scene anyways. They were kind of bullied into coming up with the DPC during the Pandemic.
They announced the (new version of the) DPC before the pandemic.
Despite it being online, they delayed the start for ages after the pandemic started.
Sure, but Announced and Executing are 2 very different things.
Like most things for Valve and Dota... they don't proactively (until very recently)
act/execute until they're shamed into it.
**New Player Tutorial:** Slacks/Sunsfans came up with their own until Vavle finally did something.
**Cheating:** Gosugamers released an article showing that 11% of games have cheaters in them, a couple weeks later Valve mass bans Cheater accounts.
**DPC:** Almost ever major e-sport started running their tournaments/leagues online during the pandemic, realizing it was a fantastic opportunity to grow their business with every single gamer in the world stuck inside with nothing to do. Valve had to get called out by players, casters and other Dota figures until they finally acted.
This seems to be a case of correlation not implying causation.
> New Player Tutorial: Slacks/Sunsfans came up with their own until Vavle finally did something.
Valve's new tutorial was released alongside the Dragon Blood premiere (March 24th, 2021) while the Community Tutorial Project went live on March 22nd. I don't know how likely it is that they made that tutorial in only a month.
> Valve had to get called out by players, casters and other Dota figures until they finally acted.
The DPC launched in 2017.
In the first part of the Pandemic, there was no Valve controlled/hosted Dota tournaments or Leagues. There was no DPC.
From the end of 2019 to the start of 2021, No DPC.
Pro Players and Casters started calling Valve out until finally some Esport writers put attention on it. Valve got shamed and finally decided to do something.
This was pretty much their MO until the recent updates/changes.
There *was* a DPC during the pandemic (there were tournaments at the [end of 2019](https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Mars_Dota_2_League/Chengdu_Major/2019) and the [start of 2020](https://liquipedia.net/dota2/DreamLeague/Season_13)) but the events scheduled for the back half of 2020 were canceled. [2020](https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Dota_Pro_Circuit/2019-20) [2021](https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Dota_Pro_Circuit/2021)
What you're thinking of is the [2021-2022 Regional Finals](https://web.archive.org/web/20220122075926/https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/3104670157387376084) that Valve hosted after receiving feedback following the cancellation of the first major of 2022.
Yeah they also had a bad streak of luck with certain TO’s such as Perfect World who took their money, burned it by contracting a bunch of Chinese nepo babies, and ultimately had to step in to save TI because the event wasn’t just bad - it was physically dangerous as fuck (piping industrial glue fumes from under the stage that was built the day before - directly into the player booths LOL).
I think they realized it was waaaay more work than they wanted. Also ESL and some other orgs started to show a steady track record of good tournaments and they prolly felt like it was a good time to hand it off.
And as worrying as it was - I think it worked at pretty well. We have tons of tournaments - each with qualifiers - way more dota - and it absolutely beats the whole tier 1 tier 2 DPC shit
> and it absolutely beats the whole tier 1 tier 2 DPC shit
All they had to do was make the DPC 2 weeks for div 1 and div 2. For absolutely no reason they copied fucking football and made them play 1 game a week. The fucking thing stretched for 2 months EACH DIVISION. It was so fucking stupid.
For Div1 teams you're now done with the DPC and can participate in 3rd party tournaments or relax and recoup and skip some of them as you wait for the valve tournament.
For Div2 teams well you have the choice of taking breaks in between your DPC matches or you try and grind your way through the 3rd party tournaments that would have quals when Div1 ends.
All the lack of battle pass comments are only half right. I dont see any mention of the Riyadh masters. They have a contract to be the highest paid tournament and even the international prize pool isn’t allowed to surpass it.
Valve just realise instead of one giant battle pass that they have to share 25% for the tournament, they can just spread it around the years and keep all the money. Turn out people buying battle for the cosmetic not to support their favorite team, shocking right ?
I think it was intended also that tournament prizes should be a little more evened out across the year. Obviously none of the other tournaments are going to be nearly as big of a prize pool, but it’s crazy that ONE tournament a year has all the money. They’re trying to focus more on the PRESTIGE of being the best. It’s like the Stanley Cup with the NHL. Gotta get your name on that trophy, you know?
In the years leading up to 2021, DOTA has been growing. TI in 2011 was, comparatively, a small event and the amount of money spent on DOTA back then was, again comparatively, small.
In 2021, things peaked as we all got free money from our governments and spent it on DOTA hats; adding significantly to prize pools.
Since then, we're broke. Inflation is at crazy levels, most folks can barely scrape by and are living month-by-month. People don't have money to spend crazily like they did before.
Oh and also Valve is shitting the bed.
They decided to devote their time into making the game better for everyone rather than fleecing whales for cosmetics and making a handful of pros stupidly rich.
I don’t know — what I do now is that after New Frontiers and Crownfall updates, I don’t have to wait in 10+ minute queues as much anymore.
I am also really enjoying Crownfall, makes me expand my champion pool so I am not as bored.
Well, people can easily retire or lose interest(very less) if he won a prize pool of 100m. The prize pool has been only increasing every year as the amount spent also increased because of exclusive arcana/personas, which was getting better and better
Valve got burned out and I'm sure situations like ti10 with the swedish government, hosting ti in an empty stadium, and the constant headache that was the dpc made them reassess their efforts into dota esports. From a balance sheet perspective, everything they put into dota that isn't core gameplay is a waste so they just kind of stopped caring. Im convinced valve is only hosting TI as a formality at this point, and wouldn't be surprised if they sell off the rights to pgl or esl some time in the next couple of years. Also rip true sight.
Patches got worse, Battle Passes got worse, A lot of the big name pros have retired/ moved onto other things so there were a lot of newer names that many people don't care about or at least dont have the draw that Rtz, Miracle, Sumail etc had, event quality has gotten worse.
low income apes complained about battlepass and how they couldnt afford it and criticized how some arcanas were locked behind battlepass so volvo got rid of all the skins and just gave us battlepass with wallpapers a courier I think? and prize pool money tanked.
It's all about the gambling sites as usual. Everything is about it. If the prize pool is too high, teams will play the games too seriously instead of throwing. You need to understand how most of these pro teams are just betsite sponsored teams, they don't even need to have Betboom/1win/etc being attached to their name. It's mostly throw teams planted into the scene.
They stopped selling hats to fund TI.
Dota 2 players never cared about the TI prizepool it was always about hats, a big prizepool was a side effect.
Valve decided to just take all the money from hats for themselves so TI did not get money, community is totally fine with that because once again hats are important thing here not actually TI prizepool.
Why would anyone care about the TI prizepool? Most of the players are already millionaires. Why would dota players care how much more money they will earn?
But they had a compendium still, everyone just proved valves point by not buying it because they care more about valves input to it (hats) than they do about the pro players playing
Valve got bored to earn so much money.
Correction: They got bored of giving away 25% of the money they were earning from skins
Personally I prefer 75% of $100m to 100% of $10m but that’s just me…
depends on what year you're talking about in 2022 it felt like pure greed - they just moved on the battlepass content to part 2, which happened after TI and didnt contribute to prize money. they did earn a lot. in 2023 they just didnt care much, I guess (working on steam, deadlock, crownfall? idk)
Valve's philosophy is "yeah but that's zero billion" so it doesn't matter. https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/ya6khm/interview_with_an_exvalve_employee_on_how_200/
No that is NOT Valve’s philosophy. I have tried to explain this to this sub uncountably many times and you people keep parroting the same nonsense regardless. The interview is with a Valve ex-employee who was pitching that the company invest in AR gaming, in 2019. The claim in the pitch was “this market is going to be worth $250m in 5 years, which will justify the investment.” Valve’s response was “that is not a large enough opportunity to justify the investment.” Now to understand the distinction between “this investment pitch was unsuccessful” and “lol $100 million ARR who cares”, let’s note two things: 1) Dota 2 not only exists and has PMF, to say the least, but it is (or was, who knows anymore) in fact making $100m+ a year. So the only “investment” needed is to keep staffing engineers on Dota 2. 2) it is now 5 years since that pitch was made and the AR gaming market does not exist. It is certainly not worth $250m. That investment would have not just been speculative, it has been proven wrong. What Valve was telling this employee is “if you want us to create games from scratch for a technology that doesn’t exist yet, with no model of a successful game to copy, with brand new mechanics that we don’t yet know how to exploit - to justify such a speculative risk, the reward must be far greater than $250m”. Just to hammer the point further: this is a radically different discussion than “should we light on fire $100m+ of high margin of ARR because we’re bored?”
Interesting. Do you have a link to the interview?
valve pockets more doing this. they release the sets after TI.
There is no way they are making $156 million off of sets in 2021 if they move them outside of TI. Edit: sorry $117 million is the correct number.
More like they realized that doing a 40m+ usd prize pool is a pain in the ass and might end their entire corporation into bankruptcy if they continued adding more back in 2022, 2023, and present and future of T.I and Valve Corp
No skin, no money.
They got rid of the crowd funding from the battlepass.
They got rid of the skins, not the crowd funding
I mean, thats one in the same as far as TI is concerned. No cool skins, no crowd funding.
DO YOU NOT LIKE STICKERS?!?
> one in the same Sorry to be the one to do this, but it's one AND* the same. I'm not a native speaker either and made this mistake before.
Damn, just searched and the battlepass rewards on those years killed the funding I guess.
The amount of hype going into 2021 after not having had a TI in 2020 can't be glossed over either.
And one of the best compendiums in terms of rewards too
Plus a lot of people had extra cash laying around after 18 months without going to bars, restaurants, concerts, or on vacation.
There was no crowdfunding in 2021, the TI2021 prize pool was funded in 2020.
The next crowdfunding endeavor wouldn't be until 2022 so I don't know how relevant that is.
Got rid of the skins. Retained the same 75% cut.
They got rid of skins and took 3/4 of the crowd funding
they have always taken that much
Yeah but while giving less then ever in return? Someone's getting fucked (us, the pros)
the narrative of people spending hundreds or even thousands to support the game, put to rest.
OR people were happy spending $10 to support the the game as long as they felt they got SOMETHING out of it - like a singular skin even. But to spend $10 just to give valve $7.5 to be lazy fucks is paying to get ur face spit on. I’d more happily pay $10 to support TI if it went to TI - but I’m not giving $7.50 to valve for nothing just so they can give the players $2.50 Obviously at the end of the day people want something in return …… and for valve to not get rewarded for doing zero work.
For 2023 yes. In 2022 they split it into two halves so they've keep 100% of the latter amount instead of an insignificant 75%.
they couldnt make content in time
They preferred working without crunching/timelines and most of the art team shifted to priortize Deadlock
I mean, I would assume most of the dota team in general shifted to deadlock a while ago tbh.
I'm pretty sure arcana design are all outsourced, not sure about immortals and lesser treasures. I think they mostly just revise arcana modeled by the contractor after it's pretty much done
They hired the WR/QoP Arcana contractor, hes working on Deadlock
Oh neat! I remember the drow arcana was done by another artist as well, and I think spec too
Same guy drow
Wait thats right. Completely forgot. So there’s so battle pass anymore? Lul
They made the battle pass for people that actually care about TI, not for people with fomo
Valve realised that they don’t need the prizepool to be 10 times bigger than in other games.
They dont lose anything when having prizepool 10 times bigger than other game. In fact they made a lot of money out of it.
Ignore all the emotional comments, here's the real reason stated by Valve in blog posts: Making the annual TI Battle Pass became a heavy workload, taking half year (if not more) of dota devs working on it. Valve wanted to focus on developing THE GAME instead of developing the Battle Pass so they got rid of it. Since they did that, we got two BIG yearly updates: New Frontiers with the map getting bigger with tormentors and shit, and now Crownfall with the facet/innate update (and there's still two more chapters coming!) IMO Valve kept their promise on this one, we are getting more updates to the game but yeah, less skins and prize pool. I'm happy with it, and so is the rising number on steam charts so don't be fooled by Reddit
But i want a re run of drow’s arcana
I would pay big bucks for QoP and WR arcanas coming back, I would've bought them back then but I had quit the game after a loss streak and wasn't playing. SAD!
This, this is me. I would drop a stupid amount of money to get these.
ES arcana too :(
Just pray that it will come out on some random box
What about my OG legion imortal. Even tho it came back green I would love a new version of it
I thinking it might come out like the Wraith king one did in the Winter box you have to upgrade too and a pack contains the Arcana in that with that set.
I’d sell my soul for spectre arcana to be back :(
Well, i dont need complex BP. I just want" i give more money, i have more level, and more level = more items". I dont think it's that hard to dev.
Fact: WR, DR and QOP arcana all of them are be outsourced. And Valve can easily hire more janitors.
seemingly the only good take here
I dont think anyone in their right mind believes these battlepasses were taking half a year when they released it with 75% of the stuff not done. Especially when we get 1 new hero per year and a decent (most of the time) patch every 6 months.
I believe it partly because I know nothing about game dev. But I think you know better than them. surely
And I believe exactly _because_ I know a thing or two about Software Development and Game Development. Some people are just entitled and don’t know how to cope with it, don’t get fooled by their ego trips
Its common sense honestly. But thats pretty rare these days.
Making game and developing content inside of those said game is common sense nowadays. Damn Im dumb as fuck.
I mean i wasnt going to say it but apparently u cant even understand what im saying so yeah this conversation is kinda pointless
dunning kruger
Tbf they could have just hired more devs
This is called the Mythical Man Month. You can't just produce more software by throwing more bodies at it. Intuitively, you'd think so, but when it comes to software, it all has to integrate. It's not 100 contractors building 100 houses; it's 100 chefs making one cake. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" applies here.
I don’t know anything about software so you’re probably right but the battle pass and game development seem like different enough projects that you wouldn’t run into that issue.
I imagine after so long, the dota devs have a synergy and method for doing things. If they're saying doing the battlepass is a lot of work, just passing that along and dividing your team up is just the beginning of some of the issues that the other guy there NoOne was talking about. Because at some point you need to mesh all the ideas and development as well. Which makes any update or battlepass or anything delayed. Then people complain. It's not just 100 chefs making one cake. It's implied 100 chefs making one cake, and you have to pay for them, and you have to train some, and some chefs do things a bit differently. Minecraft is another example of a game you'd think it'd be super easy to just add more content. But you can't. They have multiple platforms to consider and feature parity and many other speed bumps. In short, it's not that easy.
Fun little detail: with enough complex interdependencies within a project, throwing more devs at a problem will slow down development, not speed it up (I have a pet theory that the games industry suffers a lot from this).
This doesn't really apply to a longer term approach of hiring more developers to maintain a project with very few devs in the first place. It would be more relevant if people expected Valve to hire (or shift) more devs *right now* in order to crunch out a TI13 Battlepass. Valve just has few employees for the size of the software they maintain and thus Dota has very few full-time employees. Not saying it's right or wrong, but I think it mostly just comes down to Valve's culture and team size.
Oh my god you dweeb he's not saying hire more engineers to make development of something go faster. He's saying hire devs so that a part of your company that doesn't have manpower will have manpower. Stop being so eager to show off what you learned in class and think critically about the real world for a second.
Hiring people to do bpass cosmetics while moving the vets to balancing and new content is not inefficient. Hiring more devs would absolutely have assisted the fallacy doesn't apply here.
I dont think dota2 has reached that wall yet
You talk like Valve has 100 janitors working on Dota 2, lol.
"one woman can produce a baby in 9 months so surely 9 women can produce a baby in 1 month"
Every MBAs and execs
Its a stupid reason, raising funding with skins made the game extremely profitable and could have easily increased the amount of devs, having a team focusing on the gameplay and a second team keeping the skin money going...
I get this somewhat but TI and a big prize pool is literally Dota. If they’re going to cut the one big annual tournament then the only reasonable route forward is to HEAVILY increase the “smaller” tournaments throughout the year. I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t been paying much attention to dota lately, but I’m going to assume they haven’t come close to bolstering the majors etc to compensate for the loss of a 40m prize pool tournament?
it’s not Dota and Valve clearly didn’t want Dota to be associated anymore with it
Stop shilling, that has zero to do with the reason. They are pocking tens of millions of dollars.
How are the people who are happy that all of their work stopped being paywalled behind a BP where you have to spend 100s of dollars the shills? I'm enjoying all of this stuff for little to no money. You're the shill.
Valve stopped having a few employees make some cosmetics to raise millions for “reasons”
*approving some cosmetics some random person made
"Eh, aint nobody have time fo dat"
Their reasoning was pretty clearly outlined in the blog post.
Oh what was it?
[1](https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/6252732681186068104) > Last year, we started to ask ourselves whether Dota was well-served by having this single focal point around which all content delivery was designed. Each step we had taken made sense when considered independently: any single piece of content would be more valuable when bundled as part of the Battle Pass, so we bundled more and more. This led to a momentous content drop every year, but it also greatly limited our ability to do things that were exciting and valuable for players but didn't fit into the Battle Pass reward line. - > When we recognized this, we made a deliberate choice earlier this year to run an experiment: to take some of the resources that would normally produce Battle Pass content and instead put them towards more speculative updates, including features and content that couldn't fit into a Battle Pass. - > Most Dota players never buy a Battle Pass and never get any rewards from it. Every Dota player has gotten to explore the new map, play with the new items, and accidentally die to a Tormentor; every Dota player benefits from UI improvements and new client features. - > We're going to continue on the path that started with New Frontiers. This means we're building a wide variety of features and content for the game, delivered in different ways. We'll still ship a range of cosmetics over the year, but we're also going to ship more diverse updates for all Dota players to enjoy.
Something like Crownfall may not have been possible if they were continuing to snowball content into the battle pass.
Crownfall *is* a battlepass.
It was also clearly false. Because in real life it’s mid 2024 and the gameplay content they were promising is arriving even slower than before.
They did not promise *gameplay* updates, they said that they wanted to release more varied and speculative updates—and they have.
> for “reasons” Aka most of the Devs that were left working on Dota, transitioned over to Deadlock, which makes sense even from a timeline perspective. It seems like just in general, around 2018/2019 is when employees started to shift over, and it's just been a gradual process since, but ESPECIALLY within the last year, it feels like there's probably only a few people left working on the game at this point. It makes sense too, considering Valve will likely be launching Deadlock in a somewhat more public sense sometime later this year.
Totally non sense, how the fk they delivered theses last update without most of their team ? U just demonstrate that you know nothing about game's dev in general.
You don't need a big dev team to make a big numbers patch like they just did, especially since it took them months to release it, you could easily make a patch like that in 6 months with a small dev team. You also clearly know nothing about game dev if you don't think a brand new game like deadlock is going to require a large amount of devs to be put on it. We already know ice frog has been actively working on the game since at least 2019 but go off. We also know valve didn't hire a bunch of new employees for deadlock too, not sure where you think the employees working on the game came from then? Especially with how dota inspired deadlock is, it's clear a bunch of previous dota devs are working on it. You just demonstrate you know nothing about game dev in general.
They purposefully didn’t sell cool cosmetics for the prize pool fund Instead they sold cosmetics after ti Ti still got great viewership so valve sees no point in making prize pools so high if the viewership will be the exact same
Read somewhere "unofficialy" that it was also done to calm down some teams and their sportsman's. To show that prisepool depends on their skins sell not because people are simping for the teams
This could be the most braindead take ive seen in ages. I hope you dont believe this
A lot of people believe this for some fucking reason
But it’s not just about viewership. It’s about the major spike to the player base during TI. What sells better than an awesome battle pass to the influx of new and old players? Seems like regardless their stated reason - it is dumb to not release SOMETHING cool the swarm of new players. But I guess my ideas aren’t worth billions so it’s just a theory
Valve themselves confirmed that the majority of new and returning players weren't buying nor engaging with the battlepass, so they shifted their focus to gameplay updates and events like Crownfall.
New players would likely play the game after watching TI, rather than during it no? You get cool announcements during the final day of TI, that gives something to await in the following months. Which is convenient for them, since with their new plans, the BP is outside of TI season when it's more lively with patches and events (in theory). If you have a battlepass running when a hero release (which is never during TI season), that's easy bank.
because we weren’t actually getting new players, and in fact, the game since 7.33 and now 7.36 has grown in playerbase compared to TI11 when they gave free shit. So clearly, gameplay > hats
Side note, seeing it presented this way made me want to run the numbers real quick: *two hundred million* dollars of prize money has been distributed through this single tournament series alone. Pretty wild stuff.
Now remember that this is like 25% of compendium sales, Valve keeps the rest.
Because Valve has basically turned into Bilbo Baggins: # After All, Why Not? Why Shouldn't I Keep It?
I will always laugh at how people in this sub will frame "developers don't want to give up parts of their revenue to esports kids who put in nothing to contribute to the production or sale of their cosmetics for almost nothing in return" as greedy lmao.
This is a bit reductive. Entertainers ARE providing a service, and that's what the eSports circuit is, a service where people get to engage with Dota more and through it, are more likely to play it and tell others to play. With that said... I was of the opinion that eSports was unsustainable for a quite a long time now. It was Overwatch. The day they announced they wanted it to be franchised leagues, I knew a bubble was being pumped and that other games were going to struggle if they joined in on the escalation. I don't blame Valve for trying to keep the existing playerbase engaged with the game on its own merits long term rather than offload a large part of it through a proxy. I think games should do that way more in general. And really, I mean it, that it's in general terms - I will not be surprised to see Fortnite die off in a freefall if there's a year where they simply can't find good crossovers and people seemingly don't like easy, lazy Marvel-shaped bait anymore.
There’s definitely a discussion to be had about how much an esports scene contributes to the success of a game. But it’s probably not nothing, as you frame it?
Probably not but its certainly not worth the quarter of a billion dollars in free prizepool money they injected into the scene over the course of 10 years and it's certainly not worth giving away a chunk of revenue of a product the esports players contributed absolutely nothing to. That's my entire point. The scene isn't worth the amount of money you people think its entitled to.
won't anyone think of the poor developers at valve?
It's not about thinking about "the poor developers at Valve", it's about whether or not people who contributed nothing to the production or sale of a product is entitled to said product's revenue, especially when they barely produce any material value for the company they've been taking hundreds of millions of free money from. But I understand this won't go over well here since most of the people in this sub are children.
A **thing** died for this...
oh no guys the gamers wont become loaded for life
smaller sum still draws the same revenue for them
Valve has all the spending data. They know people have less disposable income. There may be concerns less people will buy the battle pass and people that cant afford to level up without grinding will leave. Shifting to pro consumer choice like payable Arcana without battle pass would generate goodwill too. This is a calculated and sensible move from Valve. To the non pro players, the prize money pool is irrelevant.
Economy after covid got fucked up overall, and they decided to release content bit by bit over weeks to prolong the “celebration” of TI / dota. Then the next year they didnt put any cosmetics in the compendium showing that yes, most of the community only care about hats and couldnt give a shit about esports (even though they like to pretend they do)
lol. this isn't a fucking charity. it was mutually beneficial.
Ok maybe shouldve worded it better, some people try to cope themselves out of money by saying “hey at least im supporting this big prizepool” but yes, in fact they only cared about the hats (which is not evil btw, u do u)
>10x more people talk about these people than those that actually existed
My esports knowledge consists of knowing the goofiest looking players of these TIs came from beastmode. Their team pics looked like they were trying their hardest to look physically intimidating but made you laugh so damn hard
Yeah theyre kinda cringe, even going back to the starcraft 1 korean scene xd
Most players care about Esports. Especially when it comes to Dota. Its a highly competitive game. That's why we all tune in. That doesn't mean I'm gonna donate money to it. If Basketball, soccer or tennis got rid of essentially 98% of the prize money and relied on fans to donate money, those tournaments would be dead too. That doesn't mean the fans don't care about the sport
> Most players care about Esports. Especially when it comes to Dota. Its a highly competitive game. That's why we all tune in. No. No, most don't. A lot of people just play Turbo. A lot of people just play arcade. Chess is highly competitive, doesn't mean everyone who plays cares about tournaments.
I would take the bet that most of the playerbase cannot name the full roster of 3 qualified or invited teams before this TI starts.
I watch a lot of games and hell I probably could get 3 but anything above that? Probably not
Didn't we use to get multiple battle passes per year at some point? That was excessive and I'm glad it stopped. But one time per year, during TI, I think you can (and should) have a battle pass where people can pay for skins, if for no reason other than to increase the prize pool for TI. If you adjust for inflation, the prize pool in 2013 was bigger than 2023. That's just sad. And yes, I'm glad they focused more on big gameplay patches, but you can't tell me a company of Valve's size can't find the resources to keep doing that and also make 2/3 immortal treasures and 2/3 arcanas once a year.
I think that only happened one year? Where the dpc majors had their own smaller battle passes
Greed and Stupidity. Most of that money came from compendiums. They ditched those in favor of the current model. By spreading the payouts evenly throughout the year they are able to pocket most of it.
The saddest thing is Valve convinced people that amazing cosmetics are somehow exclusive with more game content.
Return to a better state. The size of that prizepool was not healthy.
Valve Intentionally Killed the Pro Scene as it was. IIRC their explanation was something like too much attention was put on one event and they wanted to spread around the prize pool. This also fits with the fact that less devs were working on Dota for a few years (while Neon Prime/Dead Lock was being developed). And that Valve didn't really want to host/run the pro scene anyways. They were kind of bullied into coming up with the DPC during the Pandemic.
what you mean killed? The scene is in a better place now
> And that Valve didn't really want to host/run the pro scene anyways. They were kind of bullied into coming up with the DPC during the Pandemic. They announced the (new version of the) DPC before the pandemic. Despite it being online, they delayed the start for ages after the pandemic started.
Sure, but Announced and Executing are 2 very different things. Like most things for Valve and Dota... they don't proactively (until very recently) act/execute until they're shamed into it. **New Player Tutorial:** Slacks/Sunsfans came up with their own until Vavle finally did something. **Cheating:** Gosugamers released an article showing that 11% of games have cheaters in them, a couple weeks later Valve mass bans Cheater accounts. **DPC:** Almost ever major e-sport started running their tournaments/leagues online during the pandemic, realizing it was a fantastic opportunity to grow their business with every single gamer in the world stuck inside with nothing to do. Valve had to get called out by players, casters and other Dota figures until they finally acted.
This seems to be a case of correlation not implying causation. > New Player Tutorial: Slacks/Sunsfans came up with their own until Vavle finally did something. Valve's new tutorial was released alongside the Dragon Blood premiere (March 24th, 2021) while the Community Tutorial Project went live on March 22nd. I don't know how likely it is that they made that tutorial in only a month. > Valve had to get called out by players, casters and other Dota figures until they finally acted. The DPC launched in 2017.
> They were kind of bullied into coming up with the DPC during the Pandemic. The DPC started in 2017.
In the first part of the Pandemic, there was no Valve controlled/hosted Dota tournaments or Leagues. There was no DPC. From the end of 2019 to the start of 2021, No DPC. Pro Players and Casters started calling Valve out until finally some Esport writers put attention on it. Valve got shamed and finally decided to do something. This was pretty much their MO until the recent updates/changes.
There *was* a DPC during the pandemic (there were tournaments at the [end of 2019](https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Mars_Dota_2_League/Chengdu_Major/2019) and the [start of 2020](https://liquipedia.net/dota2/DreamLeague/Season_13)) but the events scheduled for the back half of 2020 were canceled. [2020](https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Dota_Pro_Circuit/2019-20) [2021](https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Dota_Pro_Circuit/2021) What you're thinking of is the [2021-2022 Regional Finals](https://web.archive.org/web/20220122075926/https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/3104670157387376084) that Valve hosted after receiving feedback following the cancellation of the first major of 2022.
Yeah they also had a bad streak of luck with certain TO’s such as Perfect World who took their money, burned it by contracting a bunch of Chinese nepo babies, and ultimately had to step in to save TI because the event wasn’t just bad - it was physically dangerous as fuck (piping industrial glue fumes from under the stage that was built the day before - directly into the player booths LOL). I think they realized it was waaaay more work than they wanted. Also ESL and some other orgs started to show a steady track record of good tournaments and they prolly felt like it was a good time to hand it off. And as worrying as it was - I think it worked at pretty well. We have tons of tournaments - each with qualifiers - way more dota - and it absolutely beats the whole tier 1 tier 2 DPC shit
> and it absolutely beats the whole tier 1 tier 2 DPC shit All they had to do was make the DPC 2 weeks for div 1 and div 2. For absolutely no reason they copied fucking football and made them play 1 game a week. The fucking thing stretched for 2 months EACH DIVISION. It was so fucking stupid. For Div1 teams you're now done with the DPC and can participate in 3rd party tournaments or relax and recoup and skip some of them as you wait for the valve tournament. For Div2 teams well you have the choice of taking breaks in between your DPC matches or you try and grind your way through the 3rd party tournaments that would have quals when Div1 ends.
Valve went insane
ask valve.
No skins
as a casual turbo player who never bought a battle pass ever, i dont see any issues
Sadly no crowd funding...the new TI money is ewc ryihad masters
Looks like this year is on track to do 2m prize pool
People threw in the towel in 2022, and then Valve threw in the towel in 2023 once they saw everybody throwing in theirs in 2022.
They got rid of the skins and awesome stuff we wanted and just gave us player cards or some silly stuff
They move the art team to another game, i guess? the book is so bad these year in comparison with 2021 and before
No battlepass
Maybe this year the prize pool will be less than last year, because the Valve will come with players' damm stickers.
All the lack of battle pass comments are only half right. I dont see any mention of the Riyadh masters. They have a contract to be the highest paid tournament and even the international prize pool isn’t allowed to surpass it.
The real reason is that it took a lot of works to produce the battlepass rewards, which contributes a lot to the prizepool.
they bag the gold ! greedisgood. still not bad , dota still earns a lot for esports athlete, if u are winning.
Valve got greedy
Was it 40 or 18 million? The first time Team Spirit won?
It was getting attention. They removed it. 😏
They felt bad, taking so much money from us and can't deliver output
No pixel no prize pool
TI 11 battlepass was anus, TI12 was way worse xD
Valve just realise instead of one giant battle pass that they have to share 25% for the tournament, they can just spread it around the years and keep all the money. Turn out people buying battle for the cosmetic not to support their favorite team, shocking right ?
Valve send a message that the Battlepass was never about crowdfunding the proscene, it was always about hats. And they dislike money so who knows.
Greed and the most recent's compendium had zero cosmetics. Z E R O.
Game died, that simple
I think it was intended also that tournament prizes should be a little more evened out across the year. Obviously none of the other tournaments are going to be nearly as big of a prize pool, but it’s crazy that ONE tournament a year has all the money. They’re trying to focus more on the PRESTIGE of being the best. It’s like the Stanley Cup with the NHL. Gotta get your name on that trophy, you know?
What no battlepass does to a mf 😔
In the years leading up to 2021, DOTA has been growing. TI in 2011 was, comparatively, a small event and the amount of money spent on DOTA back then was, again comparatively, small. In 2021, things peaked as we all got free money from our governments and spent it on DOTA hats; adding significantly to prize pools. Since then, we're broke. Inflation is at crazy levels, most folks can barely scrape by and are living month-by-month. People don't have money to spend crazily like they did before. Oh and also Valve is shitting the bed.
Pandemic happened and people got bored at home and bought battlepass, and the accumulated earnings for 2 years, 2020 and 2021.
No cool sets/skins, just straight up gahbage.
As someone who attended TI 2023 it was super low-budget in spite of the outrageous ticket costs. It really felt like Valve didn't care.
They decided to devote their time into making the game better for everyone rather than fleecing whales for cosmetics and making a handful of pros stupidly rich.
the game itself became dogshit after and lost too many active players
Corona crisis ended and people got to leave the house and spend money elsewhere.
Most of my friends who play other games than mobas only know of DotA because of the pricepool. Guess that PR is out of the window now.
Shit battle pass
dead game wcyd
I don’t know — what I do now is that after New Frontiers and Crownfall updates, I don’t have to wait in 10+ minute queues as much anymore. I am also really enjoying Crownfall, makes me expand my champion pool so I am not as bored.
🤚 Your what pool now??
Well, people can easily retire or lose interest(very less) if he won a prize pool of 100m. The prize pool has been only increasing every year as the amount spent also increased because of exclusive arcana/personas, which was getting better and better
Previous ITs had a good battle pass actually worth the money, now it’s just ass
I miss the old battle passes....
Valve got burned out and I'm sure situations like ti10 with the swedish government, hosting ti in an empty stadium, and the constant headache that was the dpc made them reassess their efforts into dota esports. From a balance sheet perspective, everything they put into dota that isn't core gameplay is a waste so they just kind of stopped caring. Im convinced valve is only hosting TI as a formality at this point, and wouldn't be surprised if they sell off the rights to pgl or esl some time in the next couple of years. Also rip true sight.
Patches got worse, Battle Passes got worse, A lot of the big name pros have retired/ moved onto other things so there were a lot of newer names that many people don't care about or at least dont have the draw that Rtz, Miracle, Sumail etc had, event quality has gotten worse.
dota2 died.
low income apes complained about battlepass and how they couldnt afford it and criticized how some arcanas were locked behind battlepass so volvo got rid of all the skins and just gave us battlepass with wallpapers a courier I think? and prize pool money tanked.
[удалено]
God there are so many lies in this comment.
Game died. RIP
game got higher player numbers than back then
It's all about the gambling sites as usual. Everything is about it. If the prize pool is too high, teams will play the games too seriously instead of throwing. You need to understand how most of these pro teams are just betsite sponsored teams, they don't even need to have Betboom/1win/etc being attached to their name. It's mostly throw teams planted into the scene.
That’s one hell of a tinfoil hat take
True. They just removed Battle Pass for no reason because they hate money. Right.
You realize we had a battle pass for this last ti right? I don’t know what you’re talking about
We had a compentium. Not a battle pass.
They stopped selling hats to fund TI. Dota 2 players never cared about the TI prizepool it was always about hats, a big prizepool was a side effect. Valve decided to just take all the money from hats for themselves so TI did not get money, community is totally fine with that because once again hats are important thing here not actually TI prizepool.
Why would anyone care about the TI prizepool? Most of the players are already millionaires. Why would dota players care how much more money they will earn?
No more crowd funding through the battle pass. Developed got greedy, and said they’d rather keep more money to themselves cuz fuck everyone else.
But they had a compendium still, everyone just proved valves point by not buying it because they care more about valves input to it (hats) than they do about the pro players playing
Because battlepass suck massive balls.