Dota 2

• 1. Introduction

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  A month before its official launch in 2013, Dota 2 already had nearly 330,000 people playing at the same moment on Steam. That crowd outnumbered the players in the rest of the platform's top ten games combined. Dota 2 is a Valve game in which two teams of five players each try to wreck the other side's base. It stayed in first place for four years, until PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds overtook it in 2017. Those numbers raise questions. Where did a game this large come from, and who had the right to its name? How does a free game pay its bills? Why do so many reviewers call it punishing to learn? And what happened when a research company taught machines to play it?

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• 2. Origins and Ownership

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  In 2003, a designer using the pseudonym Eul created Defense of the Ancients, a modification for Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. Later that year the expansion The Frozen Throne arrived, and a crowd of imitation mods competed for the same players. The most successful was DotA: Allstars by Steve Feak. Feak and his friend Steve Mescon built the official community website and a holding company, DotA-Allstars, LLC. When Feak retired from the project in 2005, a fellow website user called IceFrog became lead designer. By the late 2000s the mod ranked among the most popular in the world and was a prominent esports game.

  In May 2009, IceFrog and Mescon had a falling out, and IceFrog started a new community site at playdota.com. Rob Pardo, then an executive vice president at Blizzard, said his company had met IceFrog in person to discuss making a MOBA. Blizzard felt it was not ready to commit.

  Team Fortress 2 designer Robin Walker and executive Erik Johnson were Valve veterans who became fans of the mod. They wanted to build a modern sequel. Valve emailed IceFrog to ask about his long-term plans, then hired him to design it. He announced the job on his blog in October 2009, and Dota 2 itself was announced a year later.

  At the first Q&A session about Dota 2, IceFrog promised the game would build on the mod without major changes to its core. Character names, abilities, items and map design were largely kept, with some changes forced by Blizzard's trademarks. The factions Radiant and Dire replaced the mod's Sentinel and Scourge. Valve hired Eul and contracted major community contributors, including artist Kendrick Lim. Jason Hayes, a composer on the Warcraft III score, teamed with Tim Larkin to write the original music. Timothy Williams conducted it, and the Northwest Sinfonia recorded it at Bastyr University. Half-Life series writer Marc Laidlaw and science fiction author Ted Kosmatka helped write hero dialog and lore. Voice actors include Nolan North, Dave Fennoy, Jon St. John and Ellen McLain.

  Valve adopted the word Dota, drawn from the mod's original acronym, as its franchise name. Erik Johnson argued that it named a concept rather than standing for anything. Valve filed a trademark claim on the name. In August 2010, Feak and Mescon filed an opposing claim on behalf of DotA-Allstars, LLC, then a subsidiary of Riot Games. They held the name to be a community asset, and Pardo said the same. At Gamescom 2011, Gabe Newell explained that Valve needed the trademark to build a sequel on an already recognizable brand. In November 2011, Blizzard opposed Valve's claim after acquiring DotA-Allstars, LLC from Riot Games. It cited its ownership of both that company and the Warcraft III World Editor. The dispute was settled in May 2012. Valve kept the commercial rights to the Dota trademark, and third parties could use the name non-commercially.

  A 2004 internet forum post by Eul resurfaced in 2017 and reopened the question of who owned Dota. A Chinese company that had released a mobile game in 2014 using Dota characters brought it to light. That company had already been in a 2015 lawsuit with Blizzard for similar reasons. It and Lilith Games argued that the post showed Dota was an open-source, collective work that nobody could copyright. Judge Charles R. Breyer denied the company's motion for summary dismissal. Blizzard, for its part, filed motions to dismiss all claims against the company and Lilith Games with prejudice.

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• 3. Inside a Match

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  Ten players choose from 127 heroes, and each side's goal is to destroy the opposing Ancient, a large durable structure. Heroes divide into cores and supports. Cores, also called carries, begin weak and vulnerable but grow strong enough to carry their team late in a match. Supports lack heavy-damage abilities and favor tools such as healing and buffs that help the cores. During a pre-game drafting phase, teammates discuss strategy and matchups. A chosen hero leaves the pool for everyone else, and nobody can switch once drafting ends.

  Every hero has a basic attack and at least four unique abilities. At level one only a single ability is available, and each new level lets the player unlock another or improve one. The cap is level 30. The strongest ability, the ultimate, needs level six. Abilities cost mana, which slowly refills, and each use triggers a cooldown. Each hero has a primary attribute that adds to basic damage. The options are strength, intelligence, agility and Universal. Strength, intelligence and agility also raise health, mana and attack speed. A system called the Talent Tree gives players more choices in developing a hero. A hero that dies sits out until a timer ends, then returns to base with only some gold lost.

  Two bases sit in opposite corners of the map, which a crossable river divides in half. Three lanes connect the bases, and towers guard them. Weak computer-controlled creeps spawn in groups from barracks in each lane and march along set paths. Fog of war permanently hides anything outside the sight of a team's heroes and allies. A day-night cycle alters some abilities and mechanics. Between the lanes lies the jungle, where neutral creeps wait in marked camps. They attack only when provoked and respawn if killed. The strongest is Roshan, a unique boss that either team can defeat to win special items. One of them allows a single resurrection. Roshan returns about ten minutes after dying and grows tougher as the match goes on. Runes spawn at set spots every few minutes and grant temporary power-ups such as double damage and invisibility.

  Gold buys items at shops, and any hero can buy any item. Gold comes from killing enemy heroes, destroying structures and killing creeps, a habit called farming. Only the player who lands the final blow on a creep collects its gold, an act called last hitting. When an enemy hero dies nearby, allies share the reward. Players can also deny allied units by last hitting them, which cuts the enemy's experience. Gold cannot be shared, so every player keeps an independent stash. A small, steady trickle also arrives over the course of a match.

  Most game types differ in how heroes are chosen. All Pick has no restrictions, and All Random hands out heroes at random. In Captain's Mode, one player per team picks for everyone, and professionals mainly use it. Turbo speeds up All Pick with more gold and experience, weaker towers and faster respawns. Matches usually run from thirty minutes to an hour, but they can continue indefinitely while both Ancients stand. Captain's Mode adds a GG forfeit option to end games early. Seasonal events have included the Halloween-themed Diretide, the Christmas-themed Frostivus and the spring-themed New Bloom Festival. Valve has also built a ten-versus-ten mode, the capture point mode Colosseum and the combat arena Overthrow. The stranger experiments include Siltbreaker, a story-driven cooperative campaign, and The Underhollow, a battle royale mode.

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• 4. The Free Model

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  In April 2012, Gabe Newell announced that Dota 2 would be free to play. It was part of a plan to turn the game into a social network built on community contributions. Money would come from the Dota Store, which sells cosmetic goods such as armor and weapons for heroes. The full roster of heroes would be available at launch at no charge. Until the 2013 release, buyers could also get an early access bundle with a digital copy of the game and several cosmetic items. Valve sells loot boxes as well, and none of what it sells changes how the game plays.

  Valve modeled this approach on Team Fortress 2, whose cosmetic designers had earned over $3.5 million through the Steam Workshop by June 2011. The Dota 2 Workshop Tools are an optional download of Source 2 software development kit tools. With them, creators can make hero cosmetics, custom game modes, maps and bot scripts. Highly rated cosmetics reach the in-game store if Valve accepts them. Newell revealed that the average Workshop contributor for Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 earned about $15,000 in 2013. By 2015, according to the research group SuperData, Dota 2 virtual goods had brought Valve over $238 million. In 2016, Valve introduced the Custom Game Pass, which lets creators of custom game modes fund their work through microtransactions. In 2018, a monthly subscription called Dota Plus replaced the seasonal battle passes tied to Major tournaments. It added hero-specific achievements that earn exclusive cosmetics, plus analytics drawn from thousands of recent games.

  Community game modes found an audience through a feature called Arcade, which came with the 2015 engine change. Dota Auto Chess had over seven million in-game subscribers by April 2019. Valve met its developers, the Chinese-based Drodo Studio, to discuss building a standalone version together. The two companies could not agree, and each said its own interests were best served by a separate game. Valve released Dota Underlords in February 2020, still set in the Dota universe. Drodo's Auto Chess was built using no Dota 2 assets.

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• 5. Launch and Rebuild

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  Valve unveiled Dota 2 to the public at Gamescom in 2011 and began handing out closed beta invitations to DotA players and attendees. A public release had been planned for 2012, but that would have left the game in closed beta for over a year. Valve scrapped the plan, lifted the non-disclosure agreement and opened the beta in September 2011 so players could discuss the game freely.

  Dota 2 reached Steam for Windows on the 9th of July 2013, and for OS X and Linux on the 18th of July 2013. Not every hero from the mod was present at launch. The rest came through later updates, with the last arriving in 2016. Two months after release, Newell claimed that Dota 2 updates accounted for up to three percent of global internet traffic. A coaching system arrived in November 2013, letting experienced players tutor newcomers with in-game tools. In December 2013, the last limits on worldwide access ended once Valve had substantially strengthened its servers.

  In October 2012, the Chinese publisher Perfect World announced that it held distribution rights in China. The Chinese client has a Low Violence mode that removes most blood, gore and skulls to follow national censorship policies. In November 2012, the South Korean company Nexon struck a similar deal covering Korea and Japan. Three years later Nexon said it would stop operating servers, and Valve took over distribution and marketing there.

  In June 2015, Valve announced Dota 2 Reborn, a port to its Source 2 engine. An opt-in beta began that month, and Reborn replaced the original client in September 2015. That made Dota 2 the first game to use the engine. Technical problems after the update were largely blamed for a drop of about sixteen percent in the global player base the following month. After updates and patches, more than a million players were online at once by the start of 2016, the highest figure in nearly a year. In May 2016, an optional Vulkan graphics API made Dota 2 one of the first games to use it.

  Gameplay version 7.00, called "The New Journey," arrived in December 2016, after the series had sat in version 6.xx for more than a decade. It was the first major revision since IceFrog took over the original mod in the mid-2000s. It added the first original hero not ported from the mod, a reworked map and a redesigned HUD.

  Matchmaking uses an Elo-style rating called matchmaking rating, or MMR, tracked separately for core and support roles. The servers, known as the Game Coordinator, try to give each team roughly a 50% chance of winning. In April 2017, Valve began requiring a unique phone number on an account for ranked play. It had used the same anti-griefing and anti-smurfing measure in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. In November 2017, the old numerical rating gave way to a seasonal system of eight ranked tiers, recalibrated about every six months. Players who are reported often, or who abandon games, land in low priority matchmaking with others who share the punishment. For most of 2018, Valve also swapped large irregular balance updates for smaller ones every two weeks.

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• 6. The International

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  In August 2011, Valve invited sixteen accomplished Defense of the Ancients teams to a Dota 2 tournament at Gamescom. The goal was to bring enough mod players across and to reach a new audience. The event became the annual International. From 2013, its prize pool was crowdfunded through an in-game battle pass called the Compendium. Players bought it along with connected loot boxes for exclusive cosmetics. A quarter of Compendium revenue went to the prize pool. Sales of the 2013 pass raised more than 2.8 million, then the largest prize pool in esports history. From 2015 to 2021, each International topped the one before, and The International 2021 peaked at $40 million.

  During the beta in the early 2010s, the Electronic Sports World Cup, DreamHack, World Cyber Games and ESL all began hosting Dota 2 events. By the end of 2011, only StarCraft II paid more among esports games. In February 2015, Valve held the Dota 2 Asia Championships in Shanghai, with a prize pool of over $3 million raised through Compendium sales. By June 2017, professional tournaments had paid teams and players over $100 million. More than half of that came from Internationals, and Dota 2 led all esports in earnings by a margin of nearly $60 million.

  Twitch is the main home of professional coverage. At most major events, dedicated esports personnel on site give commentary, analysis and player interviews, much like traditional sport. Tournaments have been simulcast on ESPN in the United States, BBC Three in the United Kingdom and Sport1 in Germany. Other broadcasters include TV 2 Zulu in Denmark, Xinwen Lianbo in China, Astro in Malaysia and TV5 in the Philippines.

  From late 2015 until early 2017, Valve sponsored the Dota Major Championships, each with a fixed prize pool of 3 million. The format came from the Majors Valve ran for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The International 2016 and 2017 counted as the culminating Majors of their seasons. Five other events made up the series, held as the Frankfurt Major, Shanghai Major, Manila Major, Boston Major and Kiev Major. After The International 2017, teams and fans criticized the unpredictable, non-transparent way Valve handed out invitations, and the Dota Pro Circuit replaced the Majors. Teams earned qualification points at sponsored tournaments, and the top twelve received direct invitations to that season's International. The circuit ended after the 2023 season. Since The International 2024, some teams receive direct invitations, while regional qualifiers fill the remaining slots.

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• 7. Critics and Complaints

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  Metacritic reports "universal acclaim" for Dota 2, and it has been cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. Rich McCormick of PC Gamer wrote in a 2012 preview of "an unbelievably deep and complex game." He called it the "purest sequel to the original Defense of the Ancients." His summary was "Rewarding like few others, but tough." Quintin Smith of Eurogamer called it the "supreme form of the MOBA". Every other game in the genre, he wrote, is "trying to capture like lightning in a bottle". Adam Biessener of Game Informer praised Valve for keeping the mechanics and balance that had made the mod a success. Martin Gaston of GameSpot admired the interface, voice acting and characterization.

  James Kozanitis of Hardcore Gamer called Dota 2 "the only game to do free-to-play right". Phill Cameron of IGN also liked that only cosmetics were for sale. T. J. Hafer of PC Gamer considered the game "all about counterplay" and the "superior experience" compared with League of Legends. Jason Parker of CNET found Heroes of the Storm easier to enter but thought Dota 2's depth would reward those who mastered it. Spectating in virtual reality, added in July 2016 for up to 15 viewers, also won fans. Ben Kuchera of Polygon found it "amazing". He compared it to watching American football on television while being free to jump onto the field and see the quarterback's view.

  In 2013, PC Gamer and onGamers named Dota 2 esport game of the year, and GameTrailers gave it Best PC Game of 2013. At the 10th British Academy Games Awards in 2014, it was nominated for best multiplayer game but lost to Grand Theft Auto V.

  Fredrik Åslund of Gamereactor's Swedish branch gave a moderately positive review. Still, he called his first match one of the most humiliating and inhospitable experiences of his gaming career. Benjamin Danneberg of GameStar called the newcomer's experience a "learning cliff". He judged the new tutorial only partly successful. Peter Bright of Ars Technica criticized third-party websites that allowed skin gambling and betting on match results. He argued that Valve had built gambling elements into its games, and Australian senator Nick Xenophon wanted legislation to limit underage access. Valve and Erik Johnson said they would act against the sites, since the practice broke their user agreements and API rules. The community has a reputation for hostility. A 2019 report by the Anti-Defamation League found that up to 79% of the game's players had reported harassment. That was the highest figure on its list.

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• 8. Beyond the Game

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  In March 2014, Valve released Free to Play, a documentary that follows three players at the first International in 2011. American basketball player Jeremy Lin, then a media sensation, appeared in it and called the game "a way of life". He likened the esports scene to basketball and compared stars such as Stephen Curry, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James to different heroes. Starting in 2016, Valve produced an episodic series, True Sight. Its first three episodes followed Evil Geniuses and Fnatic at the Boston Major in late 2016. Fans contribute too. Cosplay competitions at some tournaments carry their own prize pools, and Valve holds a short film contest at every International. Dark Horse Comics released Dota 2: The Comic Collection in August 2017, gathering Valve's free webcomics. Dota: Dragon's Blood, an anime series from Studio Mir and Kaiju Boulevard, premiered on Netflix in March 2021.

  The first licensing deal was a SteelSeries mousepad, announced alongside the game at Gamescom 2011. In September 2012, Wētā Workshop, the prop studio behind the Aegis of Champions trophy, announced statues, weapons and armor. The National Entertainment Collectibles Association unveiled action figures at the American International Toy Fair in February 2013. After The International 2015, Valve gave a brass Collector's Aegis of Champions to players whose compendiums reached 1,000 levels. In July 2017, Ipecac Recordings released an 18-track soundtrack, including a vinyl edition. Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering, designed the card game Artifact with Valve, and it came out in November 2018. Announcer packs borrow from Portal, Rick and Morty, Fallout 4 and other franchises, and Deadmau5 and JJ Lin have written music packs. Some Asian schools, including the Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation in Malaysia, teach courses on the game. Dota 2 has also appeared at the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games and the Southeast Asian Games.

  OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence research company, used the game as a testing ground. Its system, the OpenAI Five, learned through trial and error, playing against itself hundreds of times a day for months. This method, which OpenAI calls reinforcement learning, rewards the bots for actions such as killing an enemy or destroying a tower. At The International 2017, the Ukrainian professional Dendi lost a live one-on-one match to one of the bots. By August 2018, the bots could work as a full team of five, and they beat a team of semi-professionals in a demonstration game. Shortly afterward at The International 2018, they played two live games against stronger players and lost both. OpenAI still counted it a success, because facing top players let the team adjust its algorithms. In 2019, OpenAI Five defeated the reigning International champion, OG.

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