Valve, the company behind popular games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and the digital game store Juggernaut Steam, has revealed its future plans for the 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. Apparently, even more surprising, Valve says that most players have never even bought a battle pass.
Dota 2, developed by Valve as a continuation of the popular Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Since its release in 2013, this PC game is still 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 level up and complete challenges to unlock limited-time content such as skins. This type of reward system has become widely used in most online free-to-play video games, such as Fortnite and Rocket League.
But now, after pioneering the battle pass, Valve is abandoning it because the company claims that it has sucked up too many resources, not actually being what Dota 2 players are most engaged with. In a recent blog post, Valve explains that the battle pass – which is connected to the annual Dota tournament known as The International – has become too big and causing problems. According to Valve, over time the battle pass has turned into a huge operation that almost always takes up the time, ideas, and resources of the game’s staff. 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, leading to a situation where for most of the year Dota 2 had little new content or none at all until the next major battle pass update.
Valve recently realized this and decided to make a change. “Some of the resources that would normally produce Battle Pass content would instead be directed towards more speculative updates, including features and content that wouldn’t be part of the Battle Pass,” Valve wrote in the blog post. “Although work on future updates is still ongoing, the first of these has been shipped: ‘New Frontiers’ and patch 7.33 couldn’t have been shipped as they were if we had focused all our efforts on creating Battle Pass content.”
Perhaps the most interesting part of this whole blog post is that Valve admits that according to its data, most players have never bought a battle pass or received any rewards from those annual updates. On the other hand, Valve says that “every Dota player” could explore the latest game map, play with all the new added items, and enjoy all the new UI and client improvements that were part of patch 7.33.
Valve explained that the future annual international updates of Dota 2 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 that players can follow. And because this is such a big change that has taken place after almost a decade, Valve “deliberately” does not call the next international battle pass update.
This is a big change for one of the world’s biggest free-to-play games. And if one of the biggest of the biggest did not sell many battle passes, you wonder how few battle passes are sold 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 individual, 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 return to creating content in the way we know best: coming up with fun ideas in all scales and shapes and exploring them with you.”
