To ensure that enough Defense of the Ancients players would take up Dota 2 and to promote the game to a new audience, Valve invited sixteen accomplished Defense of the Ancients esports teams to compete at a Dota 2-specific tournament at Gamescom in August 2011, which later became an annually held event known as The International.[127] From The International 2013 onward, its prize pool began to be crowdfunded through a type of in-game battle pass called the "Compendium", which raises money from players buying them and connected lootboxes to get exclusive in-game cosmetics and other bonuses offered through them.[128][129] 25% of all the revenue made from Compendiums go directly to the prize pool, with sales from the 2013 battle pass raising over US$2.8 million, which made it the largest prize pool in esports history at the time.[130][131] Each iteration of The International since then has surpassed the previous one's prize pool, with the most recent one, The International 2019, having one at over $34 million.[132][133]
During its beta phase in the early 2010s, several other esport events would begin hosting Dota 2 events, including the Electronic Sports World Cup,[134] DreamHack,[135] World Cyber Games,[136] and ESL.[137] By the end of 2011, Dota 2 was already one of the highest-paying esport games, second only to StarCraft II.[138] At E3 2013, South Korean company Nexon announced the investment of ₩2 billion (approximately US$1.7 million) into local leagues in the country, which coincided with their distribution partnership with Valve for the game.[139] In February 2015, Valve sponsored Dota 2 Asia Championships was held in Shanghai with a prize pool of over $3 million, raised through compendium sales.[140][141] Since then, other Dota 2 Asia Championships have taken place, with it being sometimes being referred to as the "Chinese International".[142][143] In total, professional Dota 2 tournaments had earned teams and players over $100 million by June 2017, with over half of that being awarded at Internationals, making it the highest earning esport game by a margin of nearly $60 million at the time.[144]
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From late 2015 until early 2017, Valve sponsored a series of smaller-scale, seasonally held tournaments known as the Dota Major Championships, which all had fixed prize pools of US$3 million.[145][146] Their format was based on the tournament series of the same name that Valve also sponsored for their first-person shooter game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Including The International 2016 and 2017, which were considered to be the cumulative Major of their respective seasons,[145][147] the series had five other events, which were the Frankfurt Major,[148] Shanghai Major,[149] Manila Major,[150] Boston Major,[151] and Kiev Major.[152] Following the International 2017, the Majors were replaced with the Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) format due to criticism by teams and fans for Valve's non-transparent and unpredictable nature for handing out International invitations.[153][154][155] In the DPC, teams are awarded qualification points for their performance in sponsored tournaments, with the top twelve earning direct invites to that season's International.[156] To avoid conflicting dates with other tournaments, Valve directly manages the scheduling of them.[155]
The primary medium for professional Dota 2 coverage is through the video game live streaming platform, Twitch. For most major events, tournament coverage is done by a selection of dedicated esports organizations and personnel who provide on-site commentary, analysis, match predictions, and player interviews surrounding the event in progress, similar to traditional sporting events.[157][158] Live Dota 2 games and coverage have also been simulcast on television networks around the world, such as ESPN in the United States,[159][160] BBC Three in the United Kingdom,[161] Sport1 in Germany,[162] TV 2 Zulu in Denmark,[163] Xinwen Lianbo in China,[164] Astro in Malaysia,[165] and TV5 in the Philippines.[166]
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