Valve has announced the end of the Dota Pro Circuit, the structure that governed the top level of professional Dota 2. The DPC will not return in 2024, meaning the recently concluded 2023 season has been the last. The good news is that The International will continue, but honestly, the death of the DPC might not be a bad thing.
In typical Valve fashion, the news has seemingly come out of nowhere, with a simple blog post revealing the end of the Valve-supported year-long system. While there were rumors that the regional league structure of recent years would be done away with, few expected a complete end to the DPC. Now, tournament organizers will no doubt be scrambling to organize tournaments while pro teams and players will probably be wondering what they will be doing next year.
In the blog post Valve explains the logic of killing off the DPC, saying that it was actually hurting the pro scene more than it helped. No doubt the significant prize pools Valve added to the regional leagues did help support pro players across the world and gave us a lot of Dota to watch. But as Valve and tournament organizers looked to cut costs this year the quality of broadcasts dropped dramatically, and as a result I personally watched way fewer DPC matches this year.
Valve also said that by forcing tournament organizers to run these leagues to their specifications, there was less room to innovate, and with the DPC taking up a lot of the year there have been very few external tournaments at the top level in recent years. The hope is that by killing the DPC, those kinds of tournaments will return and will start to innovate again.
It honestly seems like some solid logic. While the loss of financial backing from Valve for prize pools across the world will likely not be replaced and will hurt some regions significantly, in terms of viewers we should get some way better events in 2024. Two of the three majors this year have been underwhelming, while the regional leagues have at times been outright bad in terms of broadcast quality.
But now that tournaments will be competing against each other, and not just trying to win the favor of Valve to secure DPC events, they will have to innovate and be entertaining to secure the views. That should lead to better tournaments to watch.
However, the concern is that with many tournament operators dropping out of Dota in recent years, the Saudi Arabia-backed ESL FACEIT Group could easily secure a monopoly on pro-Dota. This year the company has mostly operated outside the DPC system and put up massive prize pools that have dwarfed any other events. The tournaments have been of high quality, but the ethical issues around the owners of the company are a difficult minefield to manage as a viewer.
Valve did confirm that The International will stick around for the foreseeable future, so the pro-Dota scene will likely look very similar to how it did in the early years before the DPC started. How teams will qualify for The International in 2024 is yet to be announced.
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