This is the first International for Dota 2 Tournament where it’s best seasons yet. The prize pool this year has reached more than 10 million dollars, the highest ever in esports history. This, along with a newcomer team winning 1st place and bagging close to 1 million dollars as their price. With all these things, we also see the best global viewership of all time. An estimated crowd of nearly 20,000 people watched TI4 grand finals live at the stadium apart from online viewers, which are around 500,000+. This year Dota 2 International is also being streamed on ESPN 3 which is a big thing.
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Looking back at Dota 2 Tournaments results of last year:
- TI3 was bigger than this year, with a prize pool of around 2.8 million dollars and an 8 million dollar crowdfunding breaking all the records. This year’s crowdfunding is more than double that figure; to be fair, it isn’t just the dota 2 tournament community who are raising these funds but other companies as well racing against time to grab a share of this pie.
- Another important thing which we see this year or maybe more prominent than last year or probably it’s just the first time we see such a huge and diverse groups of people and players attending the event. There are over 175,000 square feet of exhibition space taken by sponsors for display they have been doing since last week.
- The event starts from the 3rd of August and the group stages will be played out in Benaroya hall, while grand finals will take place at the stadium, which was called for this purpose only. There is a museum-like area inside the building where players and teams can check the display of some rare items and prizes they have received in the past. In this stadium, the event will be hosted by Kaci Aitchison, who is a famous TV host and host of the popular online show ‘The International DOTA 2 Tournament Championships‘.
- Despite all these grand events, we can’t deny the fact that it’s still an esports and not a real sport like football or cricket, which has physical activity and can be played by amateur players as well. This year we will see top-tier teams and their professional players only, and even an old timer, DeMoN, who is one of the oldest players in the Dota 2 scene, now left his team Fnatic to play for mousesports at TI4.
Some Other details on Dota 2 Tournaments:
It seems like Valve is allowing everyone to run tournaments and events for Dota2 for free. This means we will see a lot of tournaments, each with its own set of rules/prizes etc., though we expect most of the major ones (Eg: D2L, Starladder) to have a similar format.
In addition, Valve confirmed that there would be another 4 million dollar tournament at the end of 2013. Even I am not sure if this is a big deal, but for the first time ever, Valve has taken responsibility for running Dota 2 tournaments and events outside of the game.
To be specific, they have partnered with all the major Dota 2 tournament and leagues around the world that are currently being run by third parties (ESL, Starladder, D2L etc.) to help them run their respective tournaments. They will provide these organizers access to match statistics as well as other tools like “dota TV” to aid in their production of live events. To be honest, this doesn’t have any significant effect on the way things work right now, but it does give me hope that all these third party leagues will come under one umbrella organization sooner or later, which would allow for players and teams to compete more often throughout the year instead of having major Dota 2 tournaments once every few months.
Also, Valve has announced another Dota 2 tournament at the end of this year, which will have a prize pool of about 4 million dollars! We heard rumors of this before, but it is still great to hear for certain.
