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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Dota 2 has an interesting f2p monetization strategy: create a competitive game, then sell a $9.99 "compendium" each year. It's basically a virtual goodie bag. Of each $9.99 sale, $2.50 goes towards increasing the prize pool of their yearly tournament, The International.

With that strategy alone, they're likely to surpass a $20 million prize pool this year, which means $60m in pure profit for Valve.

The impressive part is that none of the compendium affects gameplay whatsoever. It's solely things like cosmetics that make your character look cool.

It's tempting to call Dota a one-off, but I think this model could be followed by many other games: make your game competitive, then fund a yearly tournament. The reason Dota is so huge today is because Valve personally seeded the first International's prize pool with a million dollars, which was simply unheard of at the time.

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Valve's choice to switch to a casino 'random chance' instead of being able to buy the cosmetics you like has moved them into the darker side of F2P imo.

I play DOTA still when I can, but have lost a lot of my willingness to believe they're not just as evil as everyone else. What keeps me playing are the people I play with, no longer the game.

So they make a great game and do occasional fundraisers with token gratitude prices and happy players donate. Win win

It's heavily gamified and allows you to buy the compendium multiple times to "level" it up, so it's more like a minigame in itself than a donation.

It's definitely taken some inspiration from the F2P mobile gaming market.

And I think this model's success is reflected in Dota's reputation compared to that over games like League of Legends. LoL has a lot of characters and a lot of them cost money (at least for a time). And they keep adding more. Regardless of whether or not the characters they add that cost money are better than the others, it still makes the game less balanced and less competitively interesting in the low-to-mid level than Dota is. Sure, high level LoL is probably interesting, but I do not have the money to find out if I could ever enjoy that myself

Almost all of the money I've spent on League of Legends has been on cosmetics. If you're time rather than cash-limited (like most of us here, I would assume) - you won't have time to actually deeply learn all that many champions. The free champions rotation is great, and gives you plenty of time to try people and then buy with in-game currency if you like the play-style.

You're never going to play 123 champions all the time anyway, so dropping money on them doesn't make much sense until you're already deep in the game. You absolutely don't need to unlock 100+ to enjoy yourself with it.

You're never going to play 123 champions all the time

Speak for yourself. As a veteran of both hon and dota, I'm a frequent player of "all random" mode. In both games, this means you get a different experience every game. You may say that you'll never master all of them by doing it this way but that's besides the point. By playing a character you learn all of their abilities and how they work, what their cool downs, mana costs, attack and ability ranges are etc. Doing this at least once for every character gives you a much better grasp of what you're up against than trying to learn only by way of opposition.

The 'all the time' part of my statement was quite an important bit.

Sure, ARAM exists - but like I said there's an always-changing array of free champions, so it's not like you'll never get them. And again - if you're just starting out, there's going to be some time before you even get around to trying every champion for the first time. Even if you go with ~30 minutes per game(below the average length in normal modes, slightly above average on ARAM) - you're looking at upwards of 60 hours of playtime just to try everyone once.

You can complain about F2P games all you like, but I don't think for a second we'd have had as many new champions released if they'd been on a pay-once model. I don't think that's exploitative, just different.

-edit- before my play patterns are criticised again, I should say I've been playing LoL to varying degrees of intensity for about 5 years. I think it's more accessible in terms of champion acquisition now than it was then.

It dampens the competitive scene not to have access to all the characters. It's difficult to join a team and play support if you don't have access to the support character you need to play. And since the most recent Dota world champion was 16 years old at the time, kids matter. And kids can't purchase the characters they need to purchase, since they have no money.

There's a thriving competitive scene in both games, so maybe the effect isn't so bad in practice. But if you want to play soccer, you'd find it difficult if you didn't have access to certain parts of the field unless you pay money. That seems like an accurate description of League's model.

The central issue is this: If you want to follow the strategy of making a new game competitive and then funding a yearly tournament, your game is more likely to fail if it uses League-style "pay for access to the competitive landscape."

League works for League. It's largely thanks to history and timing that League grew to such a degree: When League launched, there was no Dota 2 and no HoN to compete with them. League's model is less likely to be replicable to a new game.

All Random in hon and dota is played on the standard map with standard rules. Each player gets a random hero chosen from the entire pool. The only restriction is no duplicates. This mode can be played from the very first game on a brand new account.

ARAM in League is totally different. It's not even available to players until they have purchased/unlocked enough champions to have a pool, a situation that could take a very long time to resolve for players who have no money to buy them.

You gave an estimate of 60 hours for a new player to try all 120 heroes in hon or dota. That could be accomplished in one week by a dedicated new player. How many hours do you think it'd take to unlock every champion in league? Thousands upon thousands, at least.

Edit: I'd also like to point out that in hon/dota you get to play a hero at their full power and effectiveness from the very beginning. This means that a veteran of one game who switches to another is not at a disadvantage, unlike a new player to league playing against people who have played long enough to max out their summoner level, runes, and masteries.

Without going into the balance/entertainment part: You can get all of the LoL characters for free, even the new ones (although those will be a bit more expensive for 1 week). I haven't been following the game closely lately but as far as I remember all the content can be unlocked for free now (that includes skins).

There are compendiums multiple times a year now. It does work out very well for them, the prize pool is $7M and it was launched less than a week ago.

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