If Dota wants to exist, Valve needs to step in

Why is the tournament with the highest prize money for TI in esport history, but the number of Dota players is still declining? What challenges do organizations and teams face?

After the Battle Pass ended, the Dota2 community was waiting for Valve’s next move. In his recent statement, former pro player and analyst Kyle Freedman shared some interesting information about the current state of the professional Dota 2 arena.

Bonus distribution

Since 2011, the TIs have always been one of the biggest esports tournaments. TI owns a huge amount of bonuses and the participation of the strongest teams in the world. Thanks to community contributions, TI9 prize money is close to $35 million while TI10 is now over $40 million. To make it easier to explain, Kyle gave the following summary of the bonuses for each period:

The table above shows the top 4 teams each TI and the percentage of bonuses the teams receive. In the first 3 TI periods, the winning team received a bonus of up to 50% of the total prize money. But thanks to the success of TI 3, the ratio later dropped to less than 50%.

According to Kyle, this bonus distribution has helped Dota 2 maintain bounty records. From TI1 to TI3, the winning team gets a million dollars. This is a large enough prize money to make a strong impression in the esports world. Despite the reduction in the percentage of prize money to the champion, these teams still receive huge profits. From TI6 to TI8, the champion receives a bonus equivalent to 44% of the prize money. But by TI9, this number has increased again to 45.5%.

$15 million for the TI9 champion is enough to turn OG team members into millionaires with $3 million each. This unexpected change by Valve is intended to help Dota2 players receive a bonus equivalent to the amount received by the Fortnite World Cup C2019 champion, which is about 3 million USD (Hooray Gaben 🙂 )

With this adjustment, Valve has turned Dota 2 into a tournament with the highest prize money for champions in the world. Even so, Dota 2 has still lost 20% of its players since TI9, while Fortnite’s player base has grown to 100 million since the Fortnite World cup.

Why are organizations and teams leaving?

Every year, the prize money of other tournaments compared to TI is inversely proportional to each other. The TI prize money is increasing every year while the prize money of the DPC tournaments is decreasing. The top professional teams are less interested in other tournaments outside of TI because they can easily earn the same amount of prize money by performing well at TI. As was the case with team OG, from TI8 to TI9 they only played 127 professional games and 73 of them belonged to TI. Despite not playing much, the OG team members are still the best earners in the esports world.

On the other hand, most organizations don’t find success in Dota because the community almost exclusively recognizes the team as strong if they win TI. For example, Team Secret won 7 tournaments in a row but brought in only $592,000. Despite their impressive performance, Puppey and his teammates still wouldn’t be recognized as one of the greatest teams of all time if they hadn’t won a TI.

As a matter of fact, other Dota 2 teams also have to rely on revenue other than the tournaments they win to survive.

Sure, most organizations talked to Valve after the game’s fantasy system came out. As Valve used the intellectual property of the teams to sell fantasy cards, they realized they should also get a share of the revenue. As a former member of Complexity, Kyle paraphrased Valve’s statement on this issue

“We (Valve) didn’t realize that this was the problem. We may not use the team’s intellectual property without the team’s permission. This feature doesn’t make much money anyway.”

With that in mind, teams have no choice but to compete and hope to win deep enough to continue their Dota 2 career.

Previously, teams made more money through selling Pennant. And the bonus increases thanks to the sale of compendium (books) in the game. Thanks to that, fans can support their favorite teams and tournaments by purchasing in-game items. However, Valve suddenly stopped doing this.

As a result, famous esport organizations like G2 or Astralis have had a hard time breaking into the professional Dota 2 arena. With these problems, the teams can only try to win the tournament so as not to be disbanded. But since TI accounts for most of the community-contributed prize money, the teams have only one way to make it to TI. If it fails, it will almost certainly disband because the lineup cannot generate enough profit for the organization as well as itself.

Kyle also reminisced about May 2018, when Valve sponsored two GESC tournaments, including the Indonesia Dota 2 Minor and the GESC: Thailand Dota2 Minor. Despite being sponsored by Valve and awarding DPC points, Kyle said the organizations still owe players and casters a total of $700k: bonuses and salaries.

Look at the huge amount of money that Valve earns through battle passes, just a small part of it is enough to organize several tournaments under the framework of DPC during the Covid pandemic!

With just one decision, all problems can be easily solved if Valve uses the money earned from the Battle pass more properly. Earlier, Valve announced that they would provide financial support to tournament organizers. However, Valve missed an opportunity to improve DPC during this pandemic. That left the community to shoulder everything on their own while Valve just sat there counting money and watching everything happen as if nothing had happened.

Solution

Kye suggested that TI’s total prize pool should stop at $25 million, with 10 million of that going to the champion. In addition, the remaining balance from the Battle Pass should be divided equally among the pre-TI tournaments.

Calculated like this, DPC tournaments usually have 5 Minors and Majors before each TI. With $40 million from the TI Battle Pass, $25 million should go to TI and $15 million to the DPC system. Each pair of Minor and Major tournaments should have around $3 million in prize money. Next is helping low-budget teams, Valve should revive the Team Pennants mechanic and add Fantasy league as a Dota Plus-exclusive feature. Finally, Valve could bring the compendium back to make it possible for non-DPC tournament organizers to get community help when players spend money on tournament items.

With such an ecological system, the professional arena will develop now because organizations clearly see the benefits of investing in Dota 2 teams. In return, the tier 2 and tier 3 arenas will be further developed. .

All in all, these solutions can be easily implemented by a company with the same potential as Valve. But as Kyle mentioned. Valve needs to take care first, then save the pro arena. Kyle concluded:

“You wanted the whole pie. You’ve got it. Now please, put it in the fucking oven or let someone else bake.”

Understanding: “If you want to hug everything, Valve has it. Now please take care of it or let someone else take care of it.”

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