The International 10’s Prize Pool Reaches 40 Million Dollars

Battle Pass sales are finally over and the Dota 2 community has poor around 160 million dollars into it. That’s a staggering amount of money and $40 million of it will constitute the prize pool of the next Dota 2 world championship, known as The International 10. You have to appreciate the poetry of it: after a prize pool of $1.6 million in 2011, on its 10^th anniversary, The International has reached a prize pool that 25 times greater than the one from 10 years ago.

The Power of a Passionate Community

The prize pool of The International 2020 was created almost entirely by the Dota 2 community. And keep in mind, this community is decreasing. Right now, we’re at around 7.5 million people who still play Dota 2 regularly or at least once per month. Many of them probably play weekly and some of them even daily. But the community as a whole is somewhere around that number, which is more than 5 million smaller than it used to be just 4 years ago. One could argue that Dota 2 is slowly dying, but I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon, simply because the game is really amazing and its community is just as incredible.

Given that Dota 2 now has only around 400,000 average concurrent players, which is 50% lower than CS:GO, it’s quite impressive to see how much money this community was willing to invest in their favorite game. If we do the math, $160 million divided by 7.5 million is $21.3. That’s the average amount that was spent per player on the Battle Pass for The International 2020. If you don’t know the statistics of the industry as a whole, you might be tempted to think that this number is not that big. But in fact it’s huge.

The Power of a Dedicated Company

The team behind Dota 2 and the Battle Pass has managed to impress us year after year. Since the Battle Pass has been introduced some 7 years ago, the in-game content offered by it has improved by a lot. With each new season, things are getting spicier. As a fan of the game, you really feel like you’re getting a lot for the amount you need to pay for what is in effect a DLC.

Of course, it’s hard to say how sustainable this is. But my guess is that Valve won’t run out of new ideas any time soon. So the future Battle Passes are likely to even more impressive for the next several seasons.

 

Photo credit: Valve