Valve, the company behind 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, which require grinding to unlock cosmetics and other new content. Apparently, even more surprising, Valve says that most players never even bought battle passes.
Dota 2, developed by Valve as a sequel to the popular Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, will be ten years old 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 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.
But now, after pioneering the battle passes, Valve is abandoning them, as the company claims they have drained too many resources and are not what Dota 2 players are actually most engaged with. Why is Valve moving away from battle passes in Dota 2? On Monday, Valve published a new blog about what it has learned over a decade of running Dota 2. Its main conclusion is that the battle pass – which is linked 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 always consumed the time, ideas, and resources of the game development team. 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 Dota 2 having little new content or none at all for most of the year, until the next major battle pass update.
Valve recently realized this and decided to change it. “Some resources that would normally produce Battle Pass content have instead been redirected towards more speculative updates, including features and content that wouldn’t necessarily fit within a Battle Pass,” Valve wrote in the blog. “Although work on future updates is ongoing, the first of these has been shipped: ‘New Frontiers’ and patch 7.33 could not have been released as they were if we had focused all our efforts on creating Battle Pass content.”
Perhaps the most interesting part of this entire blog post is that Valve admits that according to its data, most players never bought a battle pass or received any rewards from those annual updates. On the other hand, Valve says that “every Dota player” could discover the latest game map, play with all the new items added, and enjoy all the new user interface and client improvements that were part of patch 7.33. “The community’s reaction to ‘New Frontiers’ helped us build confidence that less work on cosmetic content in Battle Passes and more on diverse exciting updates is the right long-term path for Dota as both a game and a community,” Valve said.
The future of Dota 2’s annual international updates Valve explained that it will still include content directly related to The International and its prize pool, as with the battle pass, but this update will not be filled with new fancy cosmetics for players to chase. And given how big a change this is that has happened after almost a decade, Valve intentionally does not name the next international battle pass-oriented update.
This is a big change for one of the largest free-to-play games in the world. And if one of the largest of the largest 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 single, annual updates locked behind a paywall. “By freeing Dota updates and content cycles from the time and structural constraints of Battle Passes,” Valve wrote, “we can return to creating content in the way we know best: by coming up with fun ideas in all shapes and sizes and exploring them with you.”
