14 DAY TRIAL // Dota 2 is a global phenomenon. That much is certain, as Valve's multiplayer online battle arena experience draws in, according to recent stats, almost 9 million unique players each month.
Even with such a load both on its servers and the Steam digital distribution service, the free-to-play game is doing great and is quite profitable, especially during moments like in-game events or, just like right now, in the lead-up to large competitions.
The International 4 kicks off next month and marks the fourth installment of Valve's tradition, which is to organize by itself a competition for a single game with one huge prize, which started at $1 million (€723,000) back in 2010.
While the first iteration changed the face of eSports forever, in terms of the huge prize pool, the fourth edition is set to change the way the community can contribute to a competition.
By now you've probably seen that The International 4 prize pool has reached, from the initial 1.6 million USD (1.17 million EUR), a whopping 10.1 million USD (7.4 million EUR). By buying the event’s compendium, Dota 2 players have contributed a huge amount of money.
When you factor in that from each compendium sale only 25% is added to the prize pool, it means that Valve has made an even bigger amount of cash as straight up profit.
Sure, it's also offered and promises to offer plenty of rewards to Dota 2 players and compendium owners, in the form of battlepoints boosters, new loading screens, fresh gameplay modes, as well as lots of other impressive things, like the daily hero challenge.
As more and more stretch goals were achieved, Valve added a few unusual ones, like the live broadcast of the event's after party with guest star Darude, and you can tell that not even the studio expected the community to achieve such a great effort and contribute to the prize pool.
This achievement also puts a huge amount of pressure on the teams that will compete at the large scale event next month. By now they'll probably earn millions of dollars in prizes, especially if they win The International 4, so it's going to be interesting to see if any of them breaks under the pressure.
In recent years, eSports have been entering the mainstream thanks to pioneers like Starcraft or Counter-Strike, but also newcomers that impressed through popularity, like League of Legends.
The huge prizes for Dota 2, however, serve to show that there's a huge community around this game and that it's more than willing to spend money in order to support it.
Hopefully, more and more sponsors will notice the importance of eSports and more and more players will consider making the jump to professional status. On a lower level, this amount of hype is also great for bringing in players who haven't had interest in the game so far. With this huge engagement from the community, it's great to see that the user base is so alive.
I for one am in the latter example, as after ignoring Dota 2 and other MOBAs for quite some time, I'm finally starting to enjoy the game and, most importantly, the eSports competitions that are constantly happening all around the world.