The interesting thing about Dota 2 esports is of course the huge prize pool offered in its premier event The International. It continues to grow in number year after year (this year’s count is already more than $20 million USD at the time of writing- that’s about as much last year’s total).
But aside from that, there’s not many other tournament in the scene that offers as much money around. Valve has mostly left the other Dota 2 tournaments grow on their own, but starting in 2015 they introduced Major events. The Majors are Valve-sponsored events that aimed to give more stability for the scene by having adding tournaments held on fall, winter and spring as well as incorporating The International as the event for summer.
Starting with the 2017-2018 season, this will change a bit. Valve will support more tournaments around the calendar with Majors as well as Minors partly sponsored by Valve. Third-parties are still involved with organising as well as sponsoring these events, but each event will have a minimum prize pool, which Valve will match the amount. A Major event requires a minimum $500,000 prize and Valve add another $500,000 while Minors requires a minimum $150,000 which Valve will match as well.
Each Majors and Minors will need to run qualifiers for the six regions (North America, South America, Southeast Asia, China, Europe and the CIS) with a LAN finals being a requirement.
The 2017-2018 Competitive Season in a nutshell. #Dota2 #TI8 pic.twitter.com/heSNZKz6EY
— Wykrhm Reddy (@wykrhm) July 4, 2017
In addition, there’s a huge change to qualifying for The International as well. It will now be similar to pro circuits like the Capcom Pro Tour for Street Fighter V where teams (and individual players) will receive Qualifying Points. The points will be weighted differently for each event and a team’s effective total Qualifying Points is tallied by the top three players with the most individual points.
These changes will help the Dota scene to have more structure and importantly, more stable. While the huge prize pools are flashy and is always a good point to start the discussion on how big esports is, but only have one big tournament with a huge prize while the other tournaments not having enough won’t keep players around for long. The disparity of earnings in Dota 2 esports is something that should be curbed sooner or later, and thankfully Valve understands that.