Valve, the company behind Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and digital game store Juggernaut Steam, has revealed its future plans for popular free-to-play MOBA game, Dota 2. Surprisingly, these plans do not include players buying annual paid battle passes that require grinding to unlock cosmetics and other new content. Valve says that most players have never even bought the battle pass, which is even more surprising. Developed by Valve, Dota 2 is a continuation of the popular Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients and is turning 10 this year. Since its PC release in 2013, the game has remained one of the most popular games on the Steam platform and attracts millions of viewers through large-scale online tournaments. Dota 2 was also one of the first video games to launch a battle pass system, assigning players—after purchasing access—to advance to higher levels and complete challenges to unlock limited-time content such as skins. This type of reward system has become widely used in most free-to-play online video games such as Fortnite and Rocket League.
However, now, after pioneering the battle pass system, Valve is abandoning it because the company claims it has drained too many resources, not being what Dota 2 players are actually most engaged in. On Monday, Valve published a new blog about what it has learned after a decade of running Dota 2. Its main conclusion is that the battle pass, which is connected to the annual Dota tournament known as The International, has become too large and caused problems. According to Valve, over time, the battle pass has turned into a huge operation that almost constantly consumes the time, ideas, and resources of the staff working on the game. In the early days of Dota 2, content updates were more diverse and frequent. However, over time, the battle pass began to consume every idea or feature, resulting in situations where Dota 2 had little new content for most of the year or no new content at all until the next major battle pass update.
Valve recently realized this and decided to change it. “Some of the resources that would normally go towards Battle Pass content are instead being directed towards more speculative updates, including features and content that wouldn’t necessarily fit into a Battle Pass,” Valve wrote in the blog. “While work on future updates continues, the first of these has been shipped: ‘New Frontiers’ and patch 7.33 couldn’t have been released as they were if we had focused all of our efforts on Battle Pass content.” Perhaps the most interesting part of this entire blog post is that Valve admits that according to its data, most players have never bought a battle pass or received any rewards from these annual updates. On the other hand, Valve says that “every Dota player” was able to discover the latest map of the game, play with all the new items added, and enjoy all the new UI and client enhancements that were part of patch 7.33.
Valve explained that it will still include content directly related to The International and its prize pool, just like with the battle pass, but this update will not be filled with new fancy cosmetics for players to pursue. And because of how big this change is, which has happened after almost a decade, Valve is “intentionally” not calling the next International-focused update a battle pass. This is a big change for one of the biggest free-to-play games in the world. And if one of the biggest of the biggest never sold many battle passes, you wonder how few battle passes are selling in other, less popular F2P games. I also wonder why it took Valve a decade to realize that most players prefer frequent updates rather than single, annual updates locked behind a paywall. “By freeing Dota updates and content cycles from the time and structural constraints of the Battle Pass,” Valve wrote, “we can get back to creating content in the way we know best: by coming up with fun ideas in all scales and shapes and exploring them with you.”
