Release of Dota 2

Dota 2 was first made available to the public at Gamescom in 2011, coinciding with the inaugural International championship, the game's premier esport tournament event. At the event, Valve began sending out closed beta invitations to DotA players and attendees for the Microsoft Windows version of the game.^[102] Although the game was originally meant to publicly release in 2012, Valve later scrapped that plan as it would have kept the game in its closed beta state for over a year. Due to that, Valve lifted the non-disclosure agreement and transitioned the game into open beta in September 2011, allowing players to discuss the game and their experiences publicly.^[103][104]

Following nearly two years of beta testing, Dota 2 was officially released on Steam for Windows on July 9, 2013, and for OS X and Linux on July 18, 2013.^{[105][106][107]} The game did not launch with every hero from Defense of the Ancients. Instead, the missing ones were added in various post-release updates, with the final one, as well as the first Dota 2 original hero, being added in 2016.^[108][109] Two months following the game's release, Newell claimed that updates to Dota 2 generated up to three percent of global internet traffic.^[110] In December 2013, the final restrictions against unlimited global access to Dota 2 were lifted after the game's infrastructure and servers were substantially bolstered.^[111] In order to abide by the standards set by the economic legislation of specific countries, Valve opted to contract with nationally based developers for publishing. In October 2012, Chinese game publisher Perfect World announced they had received distribution rights for the game in the country.^[112] The Chinese client also has a region-specific "Low Violence" mode, which censors and changes most depictions of blood, gore, and skulls in order for the game to follow censorship policies of the country.^[113][114] In November 2012, a similar publishing deal was made with the South Korea-based game company Nexon to distribute and market the game in the country, as well as in Japan.^[115] Three years later, Nexon announced they would no longer be operating servers for Dota 2, with Valve taking over direct distribution and marketing of the game in those regions.^[116]

In December 2016, Dota 2 was updated to gameplay version 7.00, also known as "The New Journey" update.^{[117][118][119]} Prior to the update, the Dota series had been in version 6.xx for over a decade, marking the first major revision since IceFrog originally took over development of the original mod in the mid 2000s.^[119] The New Journey update added and changed numerous features and mechanics of the game, including adding the first original hero not ported over from Defense of the Ancients, a reworked map, a redesigned HUD, a pre-game phase that allows for players to discuss their team strategy, and a "Talent Tree" ability augmentation system.^[118][119] In April 2017, Valve announced changes to the game's ranked matchmaking system, with the main one requiring the registration of a unique phone number to a player's account in order to play them, an anti-griefing and smurfing practice they had previously implemented in their first-person shooter game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.^[87][120] Further changes to the game's matchmaking were brought in an update in November 2017, where the old numerical MMR system was replaced by a seasonal one based on eight ranked tiers that are recalibrated around every six months, a move that brought the game's ranked system closer to ones used in other competitive games such as Global Offensive, StarCraft, and League of Legends.^{[121][122][123]}

For most of 2018, Valve decided to handle gameplay balance updates for the game in a different way. Instead of releasing larger updates irregularly throughout the year, smaller ones would be released on a set schedule of every two weeks.^[124][125] Around the same time, the game also introduced the "Dota Plus" monthly subscription system that replaced the seasonal battle passes that were released to coincide with a Major tournament. In addition to offering everything battle passes previously did, Dota Plus added new features such as a hero-specific achievement system that reward players who complete them with exclusive cosmetics, as well as providing hero and game analytics and statistics gathered from thousands of recent games.^[126]