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View Full Version : Valve to showcase Dota2 with 1mil USD tournament

MyNameDidntFit
08-02-2011, 04:35 AM
http://www.dota2.com/

Wow. So, Valve are rather serious about promoting this, it would seem. Dota2, Valve's remake of the popular Warcraft III mod, Defence of the Ancients, will be having it's first public showcase at Gamescom (August 17-21)... with a twist:

The showcase is a tournament between 16 of the most elite Dota teams with one million US dollars as the prize. The tournament will be broadcast in Chinese, English, German and Russian free of charge.

Gabe Newell had this to say:
The International is the first public Dota 2 event and will give the tens of millions of gamers playing Dota around the world their first look at the new game.

I have had the good fortune to watch the competitors as they prepare for the tournament, and the level of play is extraordinary.


Personally, I'm mostly interested in what Dota2 will bring to Valve's Steamworks platform--matchmaking, social features, etc--but the sheer scale of this as a first reveal really shows that Valve will be pushing Dota2 big-time and really trying to score a massive piece of the existing Dota/LoL/HoN market for their title.
Konrad
08-02-2011, 07:13 AM
What I'm mainly interested in, who's idea was it to run a competition for a game none of the competitors have ever played before. Unless they have and I'm missing something... but learning game mechanics and maps for the first time in a 1 million dollar competition?

Sounds exciting actually.
MyNameDidntFit
08-03-2011, 03:24 AM
Well, from what Gabe's said in the quote up there, it sounds like the teams have had some closed-doors practice:
"I have had the good fortune to watch the competitors as they prepare for the tournament, and the level of play is extraordinary."
Archangel
08-03-2011, 08:01 AM
They could just be playing the original DOTA.
Konrad
08-03-2011, 09:28 AM
That's what I assumed. It's sort of a ridiculous notion, but they highlight "first time first time first time" so much it's difficult to know.
MyNameDidntFit
08-04-2011, 12:49 AM
I thought it was quite clear: "first ever Dota 2 championship", "shown publicly for first time", "first public Dota 2 event", "[the public's] first look at the new game". Then you consider that IGN and Game Informer have both had closed-doors previews of the game.

Coupled with the logic (common sense and marketing perspectives) of having them practice on the actual game I really did think it was pretty obvious.