A One Tournament Sport

TanGeng

Sanya12364 Posts

January 14 2015 04:30 GMT

Get hyped for The International!!!! One more year and another premier tournament to be hosted by Valve in Seattle. But even as I look forward to another grand tournament of year, we should take a look at the impact that The International has on the professional scene that we follow.

Competitive Kickoff
The kickstart to professional Dota was a huge bang in 2011. Valve announced a mysterious tournament to be held at GamesCom in Cologne. Valve invited 16 big teams of Warcraft 3 Dota for a 1.6 million dollar tournament of a game that no one had ever played. It was an unheard of prize level in a scene that was more likely . Some Chinese teams didn't know about Valve and thought the whole thing was a scam. Other teams barely touched the barely out of alpha game which was riddled with bugs. NaVi won the tournament and immediately eclipsed the total tournament winnings of all Warcraft Dota tournaments. In a landscape where 25,0000 dollar tournaments were impressive, merely 7th and 8th were awarded as much.

The Only One That Matters
Since then, Valve's The International has loomed over the competitive landscape as a giant elephant completely toppling the scales. Each and every year, it didn't matter what your professional team did throughout the year. As long as the team was invited to the tournament and placed decently well, it overshadowed any other achievement through out the year. In order to fully grasp the magnitude that The International dominates the Dota2 competitive scene, let's take a look at few graphs of Dota2 prizes by months from International to International.

2012
The rest of the year are insignificant specks.

2013
The bumps are looking a bit bigger.

2014
Did the bumps grow?

An Big Share
We can also present the the previous graphs in a form of pie charts dividing the one tournament that matters and everything else in the rest of the year.
[image loading]

The International was almost 90% of the year in 2012. After the introduction of cosmetic bundling, tournament organizers grew to a 27% share in 2013. Professional Dota2 grew by a more than a factor of 5 outside of Valve's own tournament, drastically outpacing Valve's initial compendium idea that bumped up the International prize by 80%. But 2014 reversed that trend as the opportunity to buy plenty of points grew the International by 280%. The prize for The International was almost quadruple that of 2013. Crowd funding of tournaments in the 2014 year was no slouch, more than tripling the 2013 prize, but in the end lost out to Valve's amazing economics.

Complications
With a single tournament dominating the entire competitive landscape, what was recognized as unhealthy pattern in 2013 has become nasty problems. Tournaments in the rest of the year simply do not matter. Even as every organizer to have some money to throw at the scene tries to generate hype for their "global" LAN, it begs the question, "Does the pros care about any of these tournaments?"

For the assured International attendees, it certainly doesn't matter. Their spot in The International is secure, so they're not worried about having to prove themselves to Valve. Instead, they are there to spar against their rivals and seeing what they might need to adjust to do well at the one tournament that matters. Hiding and saving strats in the months leading up to the one tournament that matters is the name of the game.

For everyone else, especially the second tier teams, they are out there desperately looking to build up a CV that get the approval of the Valve selection team or at least get enough of a nod to compete in the qualifier tournament. There's plenty deplorable activities in recent years. Kaipi kicking Arise & Zizou for CWM and RTZ was an unfortunate event in 2013. NewBee forming a team and practicing together for only three months to win happened in 2014. Today, top teams not giving a shit has happened throughout the first half of the competitive year, even as the prize pools has increased dramatically. At this point in time, non-Valve prize money is already above its 2014 total of 3284847 with a full 7 months to spare.

Impressive Growth
Stitching all the years together, Dota2 as a professional has grown astronomically since it all started in Cologne over three years ago. The game has come out of beta. It is open to the public. It has been translated into multiple languages. It has an awesome collection of cosmetics. Nearly all gamebreaking bugs are fixed. The trajectory is encouraging.

What an amazing growth rate

Even as everyone and their noob friend complains about over-saturation and how there are too many tournaments, what Dota2 suffers most is a lack of tournaments that matter and the inevitable top-heaviness of the economics of professional esports.

The entertainment business is invariably an pyramid in terms of how few superstars there are and an inverted pyramid in terms of how top heavy the payout is. In fact, at the amateur level, the players are probably paying out of pocket to play a game they love rather than reaping any monetary benefits from the game. Dota2 shows a stark disparity between millionaires NewBee and barely surviving teams 16 places lower.

As much as it would be amazing if Valve repeat its 2014 feat and more than triple the prize for 2015 to 30 million, it's going to be horribly bad for professional scene, yet again reinforcing The International as the only tournament that matter. Except this time it will be throwing out multi million dollars to each member of the winning team.

As comparison, this is a rival esports title League of Legends and its prize distribution:
[image loading]

Hattip to www.esportsearnings.com for prize data in CSV format. You can check out his twitter @GGBeyond

icystorage

Jollibee19343 Posts

January 14 2015 04:39 GMT

Awesome write up

Im hoping TI5 will exceed TI4's prize pool but change the TI invitation process

paralleluniverse must be creaming with all these charts and graphs

Tephus

Cascadia1753 Posts

January 14 2015 04:55 GMT

I think its worth noting that while the prize pool outside of TI went down from 2013->2014, the absolute prize pools went quite a bit up.

2015 also appears to be a good year for outside of TI prize, with DAC pulling everything quite up.

While the best did get filthy rich, the not-best continue to only do better as time goes by.

PuroYO

Norway163 Posts

January 14 2015 05:01 GMT

A one tournament sport like Cross-country which has the world cup and no one cares about anything else? Yes.

A one tournament sport like Footballs world cup? Yes

A one tournament sport like American handeggs super bowl? Yeah.

Nothing wrong with that.

NeThZOR

South Africa7387 Posts

January 14 2015 06:29 GMT

Great writeup. TI5 hype!

Bisu-Fan

Russian Federation3329 Posts

January 14 2015 06:30 GMT

I'd like to see the Dota2 monthly prize chart without TIs (especially TI4) to see the trends.. maybe just in comparison keep the TIs at the LoL levels to see how the scene is growing if Valve didn't make TI so huge?

EDIT: because if you look at the month before TI4 (which at first glance, seems to me as the highest peak outside of TI), it's slightly above 1mil, which is around the highest peak outside of worlds for LoL

Spicy_Curry

United States10573 Posts

January 14 2015 06:32 GMT

I hope TI5 does not have a 10m prize pool. It would be nice if it was capped or something.

2015

Bisu-Fan

Russian Federation3329 Posts

January 14 2015 06:33 GMT

On January 14 2015 15:32 Spicy_Curry wrote:
I hope TI4 does not have a 10m prize pool. It would be nice if it was capped or something.

Buddy it's TI5 time already

Spicy_Curry

United States10573 Posts

January 14 2015 06:34 GMT

On January 14 2015 15:33 Bisu-Fan wrote:

Show nested quote +

Buddy it's TI5 time already

my face

goody153

44019 Posts

January 14 2015 06:59 GMT

#10

T-GOD

Nice write up

Jisira

470 Posts

January 14 2015 07:42 GMT

#11

On January 14 2015 14:01 PuroYO wrote:
A one tournament sport like Cross-country which has the world cup and no one cares about anything else? Yes.

A one tournament sport like Footballs world cup? Yes

A one tournament sport like American handeggs super bowl? Yeah.

Nothing wrong with that.

Wait, the World Cup is everything? Isn't there national leagues for clubs, regional championships, créme-de-la-créme tournaments for clubs and a variety of different regions renowned for huge differences in play-style that then amounts to a tournament between countries every four years? I'd rather go watch good club football where you see day-to-day effort with sustenance in applied strategy.

Also, the Super Bowl is reached after playing in an affiliated league for 18 or 19 rounds of play over the course of almost half a year. It is a closed league, no team can qualify and no team can drop out. The teams compete over players in a market where players are worth ridiculous amounts of money an can live happily during the off-season without a care in the world that they might have to quit their job for to support themselves financially. (This salary metric can be applied to football as well if you want, but they don't have an off-season in the same way)

_____

This has been an inherent issue with DotA2 since the start. The top teams all compete for the shot at TI and every tournament, however good they may be, are just not TI. $250k Starladder? Good, but not TI. Finally DAC comes along, but damn $10M is a prize pool unwitnessed in the history of esports... But so would everyting above $3.2M be. They could, with $10.2M, break TI3's record in three separate tournaments... This could turn into a QQ post pretty fast so I'm just going to end with, again, stating that handing out $5M to a lone team winning the one and only tournament is not how you support professional esports. (I know that Valve might give about two shits about supporting the pro scene, but it should be within the spectrum of their interest)

trifecta

United States6795 Posts

January 14 2015 08:05 GMT

#12

Normalize Y axis scaling between the lol and Dota graphs please

Torte de Lini

Germany38463 Posts

January 14 2015 08:47 GMT

#13

Great perspective!

ASoo

2862 Posts

January 14 2015 09:26 GMT

#14

Label your axes, noob.

aboxcar

United States447 Posts

January 14 2015 09:41 GMT

#15

I categorically disagree. TI being once a year and the biggest is good for Dota, and good for the professional scene.

1) Dota playerbase is healthy, great hype created. this should be obvious to all.

2) imagine if instead of 1 tournament with $10 million prize pool, we had monthly tournaments with $1 million prize pool. then you would really see what it means to be a "one tournament sport"

3) if as asserted other tournaments don't matter, why do all teams participate? even teams such as newbee who are virtually guaranteed an invite to the next TI still participate, so something in your premise is incorrect. even in the case that top teams participate only for practice, this shows that these tournaments have value. teams without a guaranteed invite also feel pressured to participate as much as they can, to build their CV as it were. EE I believe also mentioned this, so indirectly TI has added value to the other tournaments.

3b) even if tournaments were smaller and top teams pulled out (such as starladder/i-league) this creates room for tier 2 teams. because the best teams can choose to focus on the most prestigious tournaments, other teams have a proving ground and opportunity to win some prize money. this is not really a necessary consequence of having one huge tournament during the year, and it is not guaranteed to always be this way, but my point is that one large tournament (or larger tournaments) and other comparatively small ones is not necessarily "bad"

4) what is "deplorable" about a team being formed to win TI, and then actually winning it? what is deplorable about a competitive landscape wherein players try to form the strongest team they can?