After seven days of competition, the field has been cut in half. The International 2014 started with sixteen of the best Dota 2 teams in the world. After the first three phases of The International’s playoffs, the field has been whittled down to eight teams all vying for a near $5 million championship prize.
The International might be taking place right now and it is the biggest eSports tournament in history but it’s far from alone in the MOBA genre. While it’s big, Dota 2 only boasts 9 million monthly players to League of Legends’ 67 million people playing each month. While they’re two of the most popular games in the world, they’re far from the only MOBAs on the block.
Alongside League and Dota is an ever-expanding group of competitors in the MOBA sector. In the last year or so alone, we’ve seen alphas, betas and full releases of Smite, Dawngate, Heroes of the Storm, Infinite Crisis, Dead Island: Epidemic and more. That’s not included the recently announced MOBAs from Gearbox, Crytek and CD Projekt.
With so many MOBAs entering the market against dominating category leaders, do any of these new entries stand a chance and what, if anything, can they do to compete?
While this weekend’s eSports calendar has the upcoming action in StarCraft and League of Legends, the next two weeks are all about Dota 2 and the rest of eSports is just fighting for what little viewership is left. Yesterday marked the start of The International 2014 for a prize pool of over $10 million. Yesterday was the Phase One qualifier for the 16th spot in the tournament. Through Saturday, it’s the 16-team round robin followed by two days of the Phase Three playoff to get us to the eight-team elimination bracket.
Well, I suppose that’s unless you’re a fighting game fan. This weekend is EVO 2014. The big fighting game convention / tournament starts on Friday in Las Vegas and runs through Sunday.
Elsewhere, SC2 has the semi-finals of the Acer TeamStory Cup and Red Bull Battlegrounds in Atlanta. And League of Legends continues the regular seasons of their top-flight professional leagues.
The world’s biggest eSports tournament kicks off round robin play today. Before the sixteen-team round robin began, the 16th team had to qualify for The International. After a four-team playoff among regional qualifier runners-up, it was Team Liquid who reigned supreme and earned the final entry to The International.
When the first Dota 2 world championship took place, it was hyped as the chance to become an eSports millionaire overnight as Na’Vi took home a $1,000,000 grand prize for winning the tournament.
This year’s edition of The International will take the idea of becoming an eSports millionaire to the next level. Not only will the winning team pick up the biggest prize in eSports history but each member of the winning team could earn over $1,000,000.
Just as I start the eSports Weekend Calendar feature, I figure out that it’s a lot harder than I originally envisioned. Every community has their own calendars of varying size but now that ESGN’s website seems to have been shut down, there isn’t one calendar that covers most major eSports. As such, our eSports Calendar won’t have much outside the biggest events for now.
Anyway, this weekend’s eSports calendar has a couple of big events. The 2014 GSL Season 2 final is on Saturday as will see soO and Classic duel in a Best of 7 series for the championship. Dota 2 also gets a massive showcase before this year’s edition of The International. It’s ESL One: Frankfurt from Commerzbank Arena, a football stadium in Frankfurt that hosted five matches of the 2006 World Cup and four matches, including the final, of the 2011 Women’s World Cup. That should be a pretty amazing spectacle.
The biggest tournament in the history of eSports is getting a new format to reflect the bigger scale of the event. To win the first place prize that is closing in on $5 million dollars for the winner, the winning team will have to go through each of the 15 other teams en route to the championship.
Last Thursday, Valve released their official digital program for this year’s Dota 2 world championships, The International. As was the case last year, a 25% portion of the sales of the program, The International Compendium 2014, will go towards funding the prize pool for this year’s International.
After only three days on the market, the prize pool had more than doubled to eclipse The International 3’s prize pool and set a new record for the largest prize pool in eSports history at over $3.4 million and climbing.
It’s only fitting that a free-to-play game gets a free documentary to go with it. Valve’s popular free MOBA, Dota 2, now has a quasi-companion documentary called, appropriately, Free to Play. However, it’s not really a Dota documentary and you don’t even need to like video games to like the movie.
While the title Free to Play implies that it’s a documentary about Dota 2 and its development, popularity and the impact its had on gaming, Free to Play is actually about eSports. The documentary follows three competitive Dota players, each with a different background, as they pursue the $1 million grand prize for Dota 2’s The International championship.
It’ll be a while before eSports ever gets the credit it deserves from the mainstream establishment but that doesn’t mean that it already isn’t a massive industry. The recently held Dreamhack Winter 2013 had over 20,000 visitors on-site, almost 8 million unique views of the live streams, a near half-a-million dollar prize pool and a live performance by Darude.
For this and more neat info about Dreamhack Winter 2013, we have a handy infographic for your perusal.
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et geekera 