So Evil Geniuses won The International on Saturday, beating CDEC 3-1 in the grand finals at KeyArena, and I spent way more of my weekend watching a Dota 2 tournament than I meant to. I dont even play Dota. I tried it for maybe six hours back in 2012, got yelled at in three different languages, and never opened it again. But I ended up with the Twitch stream on in the background most of Saturday afternoon and by the fourth game I was fully invested, yelling at my laptop screen like I had any idea what a Roshan timer was.
Heres the number that actually stopped me: the prize pool for this thing was north of $18 million. Not from a sponsor, not from Valve writing a check. It came almost entirely from players buying a $9.99 "Compendium" in the game itself, a chunk of every sale getting funneled straight into the pot. Valve has been doing this since 2013 and every year the number gets more absurd. First place alone took home something like $6.6 million, split across a five person roster. Thats more than what most golfers get for winning the Masters, for a game that costs nothing to download and that most people over thirty have never heard of.
Im not being snide about it, for the record. I think its genuinely one of the more interesting things happening in tech right now and almost nobody outside gaming circles is paying attention. Valve basically built a self funding tournament economy inside a free video game, and it works because enough people wanted a stupid announcer pack or a new terrain skin. Compare that to how much hand wringing there was over Kickstarter fraud stories a couple years back, and now theres a company quietly moving eight figures through microtransactions and calling it a summer event.
What got me watching in the first place, honestly, was less the game and more the production. Multiple casters, real time stat overlays, a full arena of people in jerseys cheering for a team called Evil Geniuses like it was a real sport. KeyArena seats over 10,000 people and from the crowd shots it looked packed. Ive been half following this esports thing since the SC2 days when it was mostly Korean broadcasts with dodgy English subtitles, and the jump in production value over three or four years is kind of wild. Twitch obviously has a lot to do with that, and I'll say it plainly, without Twitch existing this entire scene doesnt scale the way it has. A tournament this size fifteen years ago is a LAN party in a hotel ballroom with forty people watching.
The part that still bugs me a little is how opaque the whole thing is if youre not already in it. I couldnt tell you what half the items on the shop screen do. The pacing is nothing like watching, say, a basketball game where you can drop in cold and follow the ball. Somebody explained the drafting phase to me over text mid stream and I still only got about sixty percent of it. Theres a real barrier to entry here that traditional sports mostly dont have, and Im curious whether that caps how big this can actually get, or whether it just doesnt matter because the built-in audience is already enormous on its own.
Anyway. CDEC made it to the finals as basically the underdog story of the tournament, a team that had to qualify through a wildcard route and ended up one of the last four standing, which is the kind of narrative that makes for a good broadcast even if you dont know the meta. EG closing it out 3-1 felt appropriately dramatic, with the last game going almost an hour.
Ill probably forget most of the specific plays by next week, Im not going to pretend Ive become a Dota person overnight. But the money thing is going to stick with me. Somewhere there are five guys who just got wired seven figures each for playing a video game that launched as a mod for another game, and a company that made that possible by selling cosmetic hats. Its a strange little corner of the industry and I think its only getting bigger from here.