Official 'what is Dota anymore' discussion - Page 416

Valve's start with Dota 2 and the International was a direct attempt from them to help professional players benefit from some of the value that they generate in the community. Pennants and tournament tickets were a continuation of their attempts to essentially create a conduit for the community to funnel money into some of the valuable members, aka pros. The workshop is a similar thing although the valuable members in question there are not pros.

Regardless, by and large valve have successfully created an ecosystem whereby a professional player can extract enough value from the community that it is inherently worth it for them to focus their attention on bringing in value and building the scene. Now, I suspect that if you ask valve, they aren't content with the current system but they are pleased with some aspects of it. However, very few of these systems currently are in place for CS:GO.

When CSGO got going and pro's started transitioning to it from both 1.6 and source, existing pros were much like existing Dota 1 pros. While the CS scene in Europe definitely offered more to professionals than the Dota Scene, by and large the idea of going pro in CS really meant earning a pittance playing in tournaments, and a pittance from sponsorship organizations. Streaming wasn't very big so there wasn't money to be made there, and all in all pros simply weren't making much cash. But they were making more than in Dota, and Valve wasn't invested in CS:GO as they were with Dota 2. Hidden Path studios wrote the original game, for example (I think, i may be slightly off on a few facts with respect to early CSGO but the situation i'm describing is essentially correct). The game itself floundered badly for a variety of reasons up until the introduction of the Arms Deal (or whatever) update that introduced the now-ubiquitous skins.

Before the Arms Deal update, Valve wasn't making a ton of money off of CSGO. As intelligent gamers can tell by now, selling a game for a flat price and then maintaining it isn't a winning business model anymore unless you sell a new version every year. When your flat price is like $20 or so, its just awful. When valve isn't making money from the game, it's hard for them to create revenue streams that reward the professional players bringing their value into the community. The introduction of skins of course created a huge inflow of money for Valve, which in turn allowed them to start thinking about how to then shift a proportionate amount of that value to the players. Basically they fucking failed and the value in the community from skins etc far outstripped the reward system valve managed to implement for professional players (especially since valve's pro-reward system was horrendously narrow in terms of who benefitted). So the value that the pro's were generating was being realized primarly in the skin betting scene and unsurprisingly players started to look for ways to extract some of the value that they were putting on to that specific system. It's hard to argue that players who make almost no money off the game but provide entertainment etc shouldn't be betting using their superior game knowledge and team familiarity to generate some sort of return for themselves. However, that mindset eventually led to the slippery slope that has caused such issues recently. Yes, throwing is completely different from using the inside knowledge that say "Player X is sick and so team Y will underperform" but once players realized that they could make thousands of dollars off of betting and there wasn't anything stopping them or limiting them, it was only a matter of time until that slope was slipped down.