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This is awesome - I think there's a huge intersection between Esports and the HN crowd - look at how many people on here love playing games like StarCraft, League, MineCraft, Dota2, etc. Also, Twitch is absolutely (forgive the cliche) killing it and they're a YC. Minefold (YC W12) was also a game server company but it looks like they're now defunct.

It's interesting to note that last year Valve was able to raise $1,274,380 over a three month period. I've been around Esports for a long time and I truly feel we're about to hit the golden age. Exciting stuff!

I watched (OK, not all of it) one of the games you linked and I don't understand any of what the commentators are saying. It relies heavily on knowing what the hell is going on to be appreciated. FPSs don't have this problem, yet they remain a smaller niche.

Even if you don't know anything about Doom, you'll have no trouble following this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcSj0lk-vEo

...I can't believe I'm recommending anything - I don't even like spectator sports. But I used to play doom back when e-sports were still science-fiction.

Dota has a vertical cliff for a learning curve. It's not surprising you can't follow it. The problem is that whilst that's a barrier to entry for casual watching, it's also what makes the game so popular.

Without that same depth of gameplay, dota would not be nearly as popular. I'm not sure how you go about resolving that - maybe there is some better balance?

Yeah, agreed, that's Dota's single biggest flaw: it's hard for newcomers to watch it and enjoy it like a game of football. Although, in fairness, football's popularity may have something to do with that.

If you watch Free to Play (linked above) it helps clarify things somewhat. (It's pretty interesting anyway.) But it may be an unsolvable problem, which would be unfortunate.

Then again, the tournament scene is still in its nascent stages. Once the production quality goes up some more, there may be a brief intro for each hero selected that describes to the audience what the hero can do and what its items usually are and what they do.

>Then again, the tournament scene is still in its nascent stages. Once the production quality goes up some more, there may be a brief intro for each hero selected that describes to the audience what the hero can do and what its items usually are and what they do.

It might happen that way, in one single game the teams go through 20 heroes of which 5 are banned by both sides and 5 are picked by both sides.

Okay I'll be straight with you this is about the game genre.

If you play or played a FPS game, you can literally watch any FPS game no matter how complicated the cast is, sooner or later you would get it.

In case of Dota2 or rather any game of that genre, you need to have played any MOBA ( Multiplayer online battle arena ) game.

Any Dota2 player can watch a League of Legends game, they are not the same but similar as the basic of a MOBA game are clear to that dota2 player. They just need to watch and understand the Heroes and their spells. Rest gameplay mechanics, inventory items etc are comparatively easy to follow.

FPS is much more of a visceral experience to me. RTS is perfect for esports IMO. Even superficially, think about soccer or football. The spectator can see the whole field. Players work as a team to orchestrate big plays. Different players have distinctly different roles. The parallels go on.

FPS has a lot of this, but it gives the player a more visceral experience- and as a trade-off, makes it more difficult for a spectator to "watch the game".

The part about having to understand some of the lingo and all? Well, football (both US & EU) is completely obtuse to the uninitiated.

For comparison: Valve did the same thing last year, with the same starting point, and raised an extra $1.2M for the prize pool over the course of the event. This year, they've raised the prize pool by $1.7M in the first two days -- and the finals are still about two months off!

A major factor here is probably that Valve has explicitly gamified contribution by introducing a Compendium "level" controlling access to some bonus content as it increases, which can be increased either by participating in certain Compendium content or, most importantly, by paying extra. :)

You forgot to mention, all this from a Free-to-Play game.

Also, the TI4 games are free to watch for any and every one and Compendium is just a ticket with a lot of goodies and adds to the prize pool.

That's interesting stats and great leverage of their community by Valve. League of Legends seems to boast a much higher (in number of players but also in toxic trolls) community, but they don't have the distribution/media channels per se although online viewership of League of Legends can surpass 100k on twitch.tv

I think this segment of the gaming arena will really hot up when Blizzard release their competing title directly against Dota2 and leage of Legends.

Blizzard's making a competing title? Heh. I'm pretty sure the creator of Dota offered Blizzard the chance to create Dota 2 back in like 2009, but they turned him away. He wound up going to Valve and they made Dota 2.

What's Blizzard's new title? Thanks for pointing that out!

The creator of DotA (Allstars, the most popular incarnation)[0] works for Riot on League of Legends. The guy at Valve[1] inherited it. The creator of the original DotA also works at Valve, but he came and went long before Allstars blew up. (He actually stopped working on DotA to create a sequel, Thirst for Gamma, which was truly awful and never made it out of the gate.)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Feak [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceFrog

>The creator of DotA (Allstars, the most popular incarnation)[0] works for Riot on League of Legends. The guy at Valve[1] inherited it.

I would argue that Icefrog's version was the most popular incarnation. It may have started off as simply an inheritance of Allstars, but Icefrog is the one that actually balanced it and made it something that was competitive. The popularity skyrocketed after Icefrog took over for Guinsoo.

Blizzard's new title is called Heroes of the Storm. It's free to play as well, but works in a similar manner to League of Legends, where there is a rotation of free heroes to play every week. If you want other heroes, you earn them through playing the game, or microtransactions. It seems to be aimed more at a casual crowd, though.

I don't know about its weekly hero rotation ( sucks ) but you are right its more at a casual crowd. Also one of the things they are proud about is the amount of time per game is not variable as in other MOBA games, rather short 15mins game is what it takes for one game.

Blizzard will only somehow succeed if they manage to get a nice casual community for this game unlike LOL and DOTA2.

Lot's of people are complaining about the people not speaking in English on Euro and US servers and trolling other all the way. Blizzard needs to keep attention on this point as their did on other games.

Unlike Dota2, Blizzard was able to handle that before because they never had to deal with issue where team mates communicate in different language.

You cannot stop a person from joining a English server if he doesn't want to. MOBA games need to be a team play and that issue is hard to solve, unless they come with a real time language transcriber/translator for in-game text chat. That tool is clearly a possible thing to do.[1]

Since thats a third party tool it isn't perfect but platform developers could work on something similar and smart.

[1] Dota2 Translator http://sletmo.com/ / https://github.com/patriksletmo/Dota2Translator

That's true, you can't stop a person to join a specific server but also speaking in different languages and not respecting other team mates is also not good for the game. This create problems and destroy the gameplay.

So there is no easy solution for this problem.

Blizzard turned them down because iirc they were working on Starcraft 2 which the devs were very elitist against Dota. I'm sure they now regret it now since Dota 2 has some insane number of hours racked up on steam (more than any steam game).

I doubt they regret that decision.

>they were working on Starcraft 2

If they were then SC2 did great for the company.

1M copies were sold in the first 24hours and around 3M in the first month itself.

The expansion Heart of the Swarm sold 1.1M in the first 2days of launch.

Dota2 on the other hand is free-to-play, of course there are items to purchase in game but since it isn't required to buy to play most play the game without buying anything.

The amount of compendiums sold isn't acurate. The prize pool is being buffed by the purchase of compendium points to garner additional features (with many players sinking money many times more than what the compendium cost). I wouldn't be surprised if this is a big factor behind how fast the prize pool is growing.

Indeed. The added option of leveling up your compendium was a genius move by Valve. There is a screenshot[1] of someone with level 1058 on his compendium already. Seeing as $10 buys you 24 levels, he spent over $400 on it.

[1] - http://i.imgur.com/VSPWNDu.jpg

You can earn levels through playing the game, and earning drops in-game as well. It's not necessarily from buying levels alone.

Ah, thank you for correcting that.

Valve's profit is probably a function of the current prize pool, right? So it seems like they should have made at least 2x above what they're offering. Since the pool increased by $1.76M, it seems likely they've made at least $3.5M. But I'm just speculating based on intuition. If you have hard details, please post 'em!

I'm pretty sure all of the purchases result in the same 75-25 split so that part of the math isn't wrong. It's just that fewer total people have donated that amount.

Valve did the same thing last year, but too see how much more successful it is this year see the graph at the bottom of this page, its staggering.

http://dota2.cyborgmatt.com/prizetracker/international2014