Valve has just announced that ESPN networks will be carrying the DOTA 2 International Championships, which just recently broke a $10 million prize pool. The International DOTA 2 Championships will be held in Seattle, Washington from July 18th to the 21st and will culminate in a final where the winners will walk away with nearly $5 million thanks to so many people buying Compendiums.

Prizepool

People wanting to watch the DOTA 2 International Championships on TV or online can do so using ESPN 3, and ESPN 2 for the final match. You can also access most of the matches and the final match on WatchESPN, ESPN’s streaming application which is available on smartphones, tablets, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

This means that eSports just gained another level of legitimacy that I don’t think very many people expected. Because Valve was able to bring Disney/ESPN onboard for the DOTA 2 International Championships, they are in effect making eSports one of the most legitimate forms of sport today. ESPN already had great success with the world cup and they clearly are recognizing an opportunity here to once again capitalize on a very excited audience and are doing so by announcing this the day before the DOTA 2 International Championships.

Hopefully ESPN will not be the only ones that will start broadcasting eSports on TV for people to watch and enjoy. I suspect that League of Legends from Riot Games may eventually get streamed/broadcast by someone like Fox or Turner Sports who all will want to get in on the eSports buzz and craze as they are some of the most loyal audiences and also have some incredible spending power, as shown by the DOTA 2 International Championships’ crowd funded prize pool of over $10 million. This is just the beginning and it will very likely only get more interesting very soon.

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SteelSeries just announced the launch of their Rival: Dota 2 Edition Gaming Mouse, along with an exclusive in-game item, Hell’s Glare for Doom, just in time for the final bracket of The International 4 (the premier DOTA 2 tournament).

The Dota 2 Edition was inspired by the award-winning Rival Optical Mouse launched in Q4 2013. It features a unique color scheme, customizable illumination up to 16.8 million color options, and a deep arsenal of high-performance hardware that was developed with professional players from Na’Vi, iG, and Team Fnatic.

The SteelSeries Rival Dota 2 Edition Gaming Mouse will be available for pre-order after the conclusion of The International 4 Dota 2 Tournament for $69.99 / €69.99 MSRP.

More information about the mouse can be found here.

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We’ve been covering the International DOTA 2 Championships since they announced the prize pool for the event. Initially, Valve, the makers of DOTA 2, put up $1.6 million of their own money for the event and gamers have contributed to the prize pool for the event through the purchasing of the Dota 2 International Championships Compendium. DOTA 2 is a MOBA game (Massively Online Battle Arena) much like League of Legends, which is one of the more popular of the two and is made by Riot Games. DOTA 2 has only officially been out for a year or so (but has been in beta since 2011), but the momentum of the game is picking up even faster than anyone had suspected and is likely trying to compete with Riot Games for their user base.

However, Riot games funds their World Championships and last year’s season which was from a pool of $2 million, with the first place team splitting the $1 million prize. Similarly, Last year’s International DOTA 2 Championship was around $3 million ($2.8 million) with half of the prize going to the winning team, Team Alliance. This year’s $10 million prize so far eclipses both of those figures that it has now propelled eSports into the level of incredibly real sporting competitions. Many comparisons have been drawn with the FedEx cup which is the highest paying sporting event in Golf and actually eclipses any other horse racing event in the world and many other sports including Cricket, Rugby and virtually any other sport that isn’t Soccer or American Football. Obviously figures change from year to year, but at $10 million and counting there’s a good chance that a lot of people are going to want to switch to play DOTA 2 instead of League of Legends.

After all, the $10 million is split among the top 8 teams that compete, which means that there’s still a ton of money being played for even if you don’t finish in the top 4 where the real money can be had. Looking at the DOTA 2 split from last year, the top team gets 50 percent and the rest of the teams split the remainder. The 2nd place team gets 22 percent, 3rd place team gets 10 percent, 4th place team gets 7 percent, 5th and 6th get 4 percent and 7th and 8th get 1.5 percent. That means, if Valve continues with these percentages for the $10 million pool this year, 1st place will get over $5 million. That means that each and every member of the team walks away with $1 million and immediately become millionaires. Sure, there are coaches and other costs, but in the end there’s $1 million per player being awarded which can’t be said about most sports, team or not. Being able to become a millionaire in a Team eSport is mind boggling on its own.

DOTA 2 International Championships Prize Pool split via Alliance Gaming

Now, if you take the same percentages from last year and apply them to this year,  2nd’s place stands to win $2.2 million (over $400k per player), 3rd place stands to win $1 million (over $200k per player), 4th place stands to win $700,000 (over $100K per player) and 5th and 6th places each take home $400,000 (over $90K per player). Last (and least) the 7th and 8th place teams would likely take home $150,000 which still comes out to $30,000 per player which is nearly what the entire team got for winning last year in the same place. The sheer size of this tournament is really starting to weigh on me now.

Now, if we compare those numbers to last year’s League of Legends final, we will see why there’s a good chance that a lot of people will soon consider switching to DOTA 2 (unless Riot Games significantly ups the prize pool). Mainly that the 3rd place DOTA 2 team will earn as much money as the 1st place team did in League of Legends’ final.

League of Legends 2013 final split, source: Curse Gaming

Based on the above numbers, the winners of this year’s DOTA 2 International Championships will actually walk away with more money individually than the entire team of SK Telecom T1 did last year. Additionally, 2nd place players in DOTA 2’s Championships will walk away with more money than the entire 2nd place team did in the League of Legends finals ($400K vs $250K). The numbers just continually get more and more drastic with the 4th place team in DOTA 2’s Championships walking away with almost as much per player as the entire 3rd and 4th place teams did in the League of Legends final.

This means that the stakes are higher than they have ever been and Valve has found a way to make their game more competitive with Riot’s League of Legends, by simply allowing the community to incentivize the game’s growth. $8.4 million out of the current $10 million was added to the prize pool by the community, so they clearly want to see DOTA 2 succeed and by the looks of it, this is going to be one of the most talked about eSports events, ever. I even remember when I first heard about League of Legends $1 million prize for their final and how big of a deal that was. Now we’re looking at $10 million which is no chump change, and likely explains why universities are handing out eSports scholarships, even though right now they’re only for League of Legends (not sure how long that’ll only be League of Legends now that DOTA 2 has a $10 million pool).

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Some places are calling this new acquisition rumor of Twitch.tv to be one that has YouTube as a suitor and others are calling it a Google acquisition. Ultimately, Google is the parent company even though it would directly associate with YouTube in terms of media delivery and sharing. Whether you say YouTube is acquiring Twitch or Google, the end result is that Twitch is getting acquired for $1 billion in cash according to Variety, an interesting source of M&A news. While I would certainly allow this rumor to mature and ferment a bit in the rumormill, this may actually be the most reasonable acquisition (and acquisition price) in quite some time.

Also, keep in mind that this rumor is likely a little bit off in terms of accuracy since Twitch.tv is actually a subsidiary of Justin.tv which is a much older site and serves all types of video traffic. In fact, it is a direct competitor with YouTube since it delivers live stream video feeds much like YouTube does now (YouTube didn’t offer this before). In fact, the Variety article mentions the fact that that Twitch.tv was born out of Justin.tv but they don’t acknowledge its direct ownership by Justin.tv (which is now incorporated as Twitch Interactive, Inc.). In fact, Twitch.tv is a higher ranked website globally than Justin.tv with Twitch.tv ranking 279th and Justin.tv 2742nd. But the real problem here is that I have a VERY strong feeling that there is a lot of cross-use of proprietary IP between Justin.tv and Twitch.tv and we’re likely looking at a full acquisition of Justin.tv and Twitch.tv as a whole by YouTube (or Google).

The reason why Google’s acquisition of Twitch.tv makes so much sense, even for $1 billion is the absolutely insane growth of game streaming and eSports. We just reported on Friday the fact that Dota 2’s International competition Prize pool had reached $5 million. Well, at the time of publication, it has already reached $5.7 million and likely has much further to go. And with games like Dota 2 reaching such crazy levels of prize pools there are sure to be more people watching these games get live streamed on services like Twitch.tv. Not just that, but with Google and YouTube’s infrastructure we could see a vast improvement in Twitch.tv’s functionality as well as upload capability which would allow a lot of streamers to upload their streams more easily to YouTube and simplify their income from online gaming/streaming.

While Twitch.tv’s earnings and profitability remain secret, I do believe that $1 billion is a fair price for the website and their audience of 43 million users. Sure, they’re no WhatsApp or Viber but they do have a very loyal and strong base and they are growing at a pace that is more than encouraging. Not to mention, there is already quite a significant amount of revenue streaming through Twitch.tv which a lot of apps like WhatsApp and Instagram simply didn’t have when they were acquired.

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The DOTA 2 International competition has already begun in the regional competitions and the final will be in July from the 18th and 21st in Seattle’s KeyArena. However, in order to fund the competition, Valve has decided to encourage the community to purchase compendiums for $9.99 which will allow them to increase the prize pool by $2.50. The International Compendium is a digital booklet that allows gamers to interact with the DOTA 2 tournament. DOTA 2 players will also earn more rewards as they are able to level up their Compendium by watching games, collecting player cards and making tournament predictions

The awesome thing about Valve’s model is that with the Compendium, they are encouraging DOTA 2 players to buy the Compendium because of the vast amount of additional rewards that they are enabling with each mark they hit trying to raise the prize value of the International competition going down in July. The stretch goals started at $1.8 million and has reached $5 million, meaning that at least a million gamers (out of 8 million active gamers) have bought the DOTA 2 International Compendium. So far, gamers have gained 11 new bonus items in addition to what the Compendium had originally offered and there are only two more stretch goals left, at which point they will have raised $6 million for the DOTA 2 Internationl competition.

By buying this Compendium and encouraging gamers to participate more with the Compendium Valve may actually be able to show the world how powerful their community (and game) really can be. And they may be able to get 1 million concurrent viewers to watch a single event which may show the world how serious eSports has gotten, if League of Legends hasn’t already done that with their competitions. However, based on the current $5 million purse, there is already going to be a LOT of attention bring drawn towards DOTA 2. After all, how many people are going to want to play a technically free game where you can compete for a share of a $5 million prize.

Keep in mind that last year the prize pool for the 2013 DOTA 2 International competition was $2,874,380, which is already quite sizable. But this year the DOTA 2 community have outdone themselves and are on pace to double it this year.

Last year’s split went like this according to PC Gamer:

1st – $1,363,988
2nd – $600,155
3rd – $272,798
4th – $190,958
5th – $109,119
6th – $109,119
7th – $40,920
8th – $40,920

Based on these numbers, and the fact that the current prize pool is nearly double the previous one from last year we can expect that 1st place will likely walk away with something like $2.5 million while second will walk away with something around $1.2 million and 3rd place with around $500,000. This is going to be a pretty big competition with incredibly high stakes and it will be very interesting to see how much attention it gets outside of the core DOTA 2 community, which currently is about 8 million strong.

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The DOTA 2 International competition has already begun in the regional competitions and the final will be in July from the 18th and 21st in Seattle’s KeyArena. However, in order to fund the competition, Valve has decided to encourage the community to purchase compendiums for $9.99 which will allow them to increase the prize pool by $2.50. The International Compendium is a digital booklet that allows gamers to interact with the DOTA 2 tournament. DOTA 2 players will also earn more rewards as they are able to level up their Compendium by watching games, collecting player cards and making tournament predictions

The awesome thing about Valve’s model is that with the Compendium, they are encouraging DOTA 2 players to buy the Compendium because of the vast amount of additional rewards that they are enabling with each mark they hit trying to raise the prize value of the International competition going down in July. The stretch goals started at $1.8 million and has reached $5 million, meaning that at least a million gamers (out of 8 million active gamers) have bought the DOTA 2 International Compendium. So far, gamers have gained 11 new bonus items in addition to what the Compendium had originally offered and there are only two more stretch goals left, at which point they will have raised $6 million for the DOTA 2 Internationl competition.

By buying this Compendium and encouraging gamers to participate more with the Compendium Valve may actually be able to show the world how powerful their community (and game) really can be. And they may be able to get 1 million concurrent viewers to watch a single event which may show the world how serious eSports has gotten, if League of Legends hasn’t already done that with their competitions. However, based on the current $5 million purse, there is already going to be a LOT of attention bring drawn towards DOTA 2. After all, how many people are going to want to play a technically free game where you can compete for a share of a $5 million prize.

Keep in mind that last year the prize pool for the 2013 DOTA 2 International competition was $2,874,380, which is already quite sizable. But this year the DOTA 2 community have outdone themselves and are on pace to double it this year.

Last year’s split went like this according to PC Gamer:

1st – $1,363,988
2nd – $600,155
3rd – $272,798
4th – $190,958
5th – $109,119
6th – $109,119
7th – $40,920
8th – $40,920

Based on these numbers, and the fact that the current prize pool is nearly double the previous one from last year we can expect that 1st place will likely walk away with something like $2.5 million while second will walk away with something around $1.2 million and 3rd place with around $500,000. This is going to be a pretty big competition with incredibly high stakes and it will be very interesting to see how much attention it gets outside of the core DOTA 2 community, which currently is about 8 million strong.

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