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The final prize pool of The International 11

In just several days, The International 11 will be over and the final prize pool will be announced. Judging... Radu M. | 26. October 2022

In just several days, The International 11 will be over and the final prize pool will be announced. Judging by the way things stand right now, it’s clear that the prize will be somewhere between $18 and $19 million. That’s around half of what it was last year ($40 million) but it’s still an enormous amount of money.

The winning team will receive more than $8 million, which is enough to turn every one of the players into a wealthy Dota 2 competitor who will not have to worry about money for a long time.

In many cases, the players who will be competing for the remaining TI11 prize pool are already quite wealthy because they won numerous Majors during their careers and even TIs.

Tundra Esports and Team Aster could really use the money. Team Secret and Team Liquid not so much.

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Valve Corporation

What went “wrong” this year

This is the first time in the history of The International that an edition of the tournament has a lower prize pool than the previous one. Of course, this was bound to happen at some point, and given the enormous prize pool from last year, everyone knew it would happen this season. But why the massive drop?

The prize could have been $30 million or at least $25 million. But unfortunately, Valve messed up a bit this year and disappointed the Dota 2 community with an underwhelming Battle Pass that copied some of the features from the previous Battle Passes and also made it hard for the players to get the rewards.

On top of that, the Battle Pass got split in half and the TI11 competitors only got 25% of the sales of the first half. This made people angry, even though the final prize is still huge. Once you get a community used to one way of doing things, acting in a greedy way is guaranteed to have consequences.

As a game, Dota 2 has been struggling to grow for many years. The peak was reached in February 2016. Back then, around 14 million people were playing the game. Then came a long period of decline.

The lowest point was January 2020. At that point, only around 7.5 million people were still playing Dota 2 and the average number of concurrent players was 378.000. Right now, we’re at 429.000.

In the last 30 days, the average number of Dota 2 players decreased by 12.5%, which is a huge decline. Was it caused by The International 11? Or was it caused by people quitting the game? We’ll find out in the next two months.

Header: Valve Corporation