The annual Dota 2 Battle Pass has been criticized by fans for the past several years, but Valve has announced that it won't be produced this year. Instead, the company will focus on creating content that will be made available to all players, not just those who purchase a Battle Pass.
The Battle Pass content release had grown to be Dota's biggest update of the year, according to a blog post by Valve, which left the remainder of the year feeling a little bit bare. The previous two years have seen a lot of this, with significant updates to the core game taking months to come out. Now that a new strategy is being used, the Battle Pass has practically been cancelled. Instead of packing all the content into one huge update a few months before The International, Valve will instead provide "more diverse updates for all Dota players to enjoy" across the entire year.
This year, a September update will be delivered that includes some of the content you might anticipate from the typical Battle Pass, but no new cosmetic items, which have historically been an important component of Battle Pass iterations. With the changes to the Battle Pass system, The International's prize pool will still include the crowdfunding component that made it the largest esports competition in the world in terms of money offered, but it is unlikely to surpass any of its prior financing records.
This September's update, according to Valve, will be focused on "the event, the players, and the games," which suggests that we will most likely receive the player fantasy cards, talent voice lines, and stickers that were first released last year. If that is the only contribution to the TI prize pool, then this year's prize pool may be historically small. However, the advantage of this is that the dev team now has more resources to devote to major game updates. Valve credits the most recent 7.33 release as the first product of this new direction. Losing a few hats once a year sounds like a good reward if this is the scale of updates going ahead given how well the update has been accepted by the community.
It is important to remember that in 2022, for the first time ever, a lower amount of crowd funding was obtained, which resulted in The International's prize pool being lower than the previous version. Despite Valve's claims that this change will help the game live longer, it likely also has to do with the fact that they would have received less money from the Battle Pass from the previous year.
It's not all bad news in the Dota 2 world, though. Valve used the blog post to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the official launch of Dota 2 and disclosed that they are already working to find a location for The International 2024.
The Battle Pass content release had grown to be Dota's biggest update of the year, according to a blog post by Valve, which left the remainder of the year feeling a little bit bare. The previous two years have seen a lot of this, with significant updates to the core game taking months to come out. Now that a new strategy is being used, the Battle Pass has practically been cancelled. Instead of packing all the content into one huge update a few months before The International, Valve will instead provide "more diverse updates for all Dota players to enjoy" across the entire year.
This year, a September update will be delivered that includes some of the content you might anticipate from the typical Battle Pass, but no new cosmetic items, which have historically been an important component of Battle Pass iterations. With the changes to the Battle Pass system, The International's prize pool will still include the crowdfunding component that made it the largest esports competition in the world in terms of money offered, but it is unlikely to surpass any of its prior financing records.
This September's update, according to Valve, will be focused on "the event, the players, and the games," which suggests that we will most likely receive the player fantasy cards, talent voice lines, and stickers that were first released last year. If that is the only contribution to the TI prize pool, then this year's prize pool may be historically small. However, the advantage of this is that the dev team now has more resources to devote to major game updates. Valve credits the most recent 7.33 release as the first product of this new direction. Losing a few hats once a year sounds like a good reward if this is the scale of updates going ahead given how well the update has been accepted by the community.
It is important to remember that in 2022, for the first time ever, a lower amount of crowd funding was obtained, which resulted in The International's prize pool being lower than the previous version. Despite Valve's claims that this change will help the game live longer, it likely also has to do with the fact that they would have received less money from the Battle Pass from the previous year.
It's not all bad news in the Dota 2 world, though. Valve used the blog post to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the official launch of Dota 2 and disclosed that they are already working to find a location for The International 2024.
