Carrying The International – a hit on the professional scene. How will the situation affect players, teams and operators?

On the night of May 1, the expected, but no less sad event happened – Valve postponed the jubilee tenth of The International indefinitely. According to the forecasts of the developers, the tournament may even turn into The International 2023 – and what to do in this case with the next championship of the series is not entirely clear. Of course, this decision will change the competitive scene. How exactly – read the material.

Where does this drama come from?

The International is the cornerstone of the Dota 2 professional scene. The history of discipline began with the tournament, and it still – after 9 years – remains the main marketing tool of the game. Considering, to put it mildly, Valve’s controversial policy regarding the promotion of its products, TI is not even the main thing, but simply the only Dota 2 tool for attracting outside audiences: record prize pools do their job and once again attract the attention of the world media.

Only thanks to The International, “Dota” exists in the media space of the outside (relative to e-sports) world – for many it is “the very game in which you can win $ 30 million for the tournament” (although this is not entirely true). To cancel this event means not only to deprive the team of bread, but the spectators – to see, but also to slow down the development of discipline. It seemed that Valve was pulling with the decision about TI10 just to think out a plan and minimize potential losses, but by the size of the announcement of the transfer, it immediately became clear – it was time to uncover the jokes that we were expecting too much from a small indie studio .

The International was postponed to an unspecified date without reporting what awaits the professional scene in the next seven (or even more) months. In fact, Valve abandoned Dota, and tournament operators had to save the discipline – if it weren’t for WePlay !, ESL, EEE and others, the competitive scene would have been paused for two months already. The funny thing about this situation is the major in Singapore, which everyone seems to have forgotten about. If ESL One LA and EPICENTER were even officially canceled, then the ONE Esports championship is still in limbo. However, there is nothing to be surprised at – Valve even forgot to add the already held Minor from StarLadder to the official calendar.

Such a disorderly attitude of developers to the competitive season is a good reason for jokes in the community, but also a big headache for all participants in the scene. At the moment, we have only a short blog entry that actually says: in the coming months, TO will be left without offline events and the ability to make plans, teams without full competitive practice, the best players and casters without a solid jackpot and with unclear prospects and sponsors without reach. Only viewers don’t get poorer – but is it really important when your favorite game gets such a blow?

Cybersportsmen should not care where to play Dota. Is not it so?

Let’s start with the main thing – the strongest doters were left without the main way of earning. The International is often blamed for the fact that the prize pool of this tournament is disproportionately higher than all other championships in a year.

In fact, it doesn’t even make sense for top players to come to other tournaments – once they get to TI and show at least a decent game, they will get more than they could earn for the entire DPC season. Well, what is there – for the 13-16th place on TI9, NAVI players received 1.5 times more than Vici Gaming for winning EPICENTER 2019.

Due to such a bias, The International on the professional stage is a measure of success and often a reason to keep the roster. For many players, playing at TI is the last chance they give teammates, and that is why after the tournament there is always an epic reshuffle.

What will happen to the players now is not very clear. For many teams, TI was an occasion to keep the squad and wait for TI, clinging to the rating points they got. Now, instead of a couple of months, players will thus have to keep the roster for more than six months – hardly many have the patience for this. In large clubs, the situation is no better – Roman Dvoryankin previously said that in such organizations, contracts are usually calculated until the completion of TI.

Here you can object: “Well, reshafl and reshafl. So what? ” And the fact that even in September we should not expect serious offline tournaments. And how to test the players and check the performance of the roaster in an online meat grinder is unclear. As the results of tournaments in April and March showed, in games on the network there are a variety of surprises.

In addition, the TI10 preselection will apparently also be held online – and just thinking about it makes me worried about the quality of matches at the anniversary tournament of the series. We have already seen many times how this or that club surprised rivals in regional online qualifiers and got to the major only to fall in last place without any results. I would not want to see such scenarios on TI.

Clubs do not lose anything, and maintenance is even a plus – no need to rent stadiums. What are their losses?

The problems of eSports clubs and tournament operators are less obvious, but we need to talk about them too. Assume that the Reshuffle at the end of the season (which from the point of view of contracts still ends approximately in September) will not become a problem and all roasters will be combat-ready. What then? And then the clubs will return to the pressing issues of the e-sports economy – where and how to look for sponsors.

Back in March, we discussed with CEO Virtus.pro Sergey Glamazda the situation in which the clubs found themselves because of the coronavirus pandemic. Of course, from the point of view of sports, the team can play online – it will not affect training and the direct organization of matches. The problem is the media component of the process: having lost the ability to play in LAN-tournaments, the team loses its reach.

This means that the organization cannot at the same pace engage in brand development, which, in turn, makes the club less interesting for sponsors. A dry “media” in isolation from integrations will not work either – there is not much content to do on self-isolation. During our conversation, Glamazda noted that clubs will now have to look for new formats. Apparently, most organizations, even in a month and a half, could not find a way out of this situation.

But if earlier the clubs could negotiate with sponsors, referring to The International as an approximate date, after which everything will return to normal, now Valve left the teams without support. In fact, organizations have only a vague landmark “somewhere in 2023”. But what to promise sponsors up to this time is not clear. I admit that soon all cybersportsmen will sharply become streamers, but is this enough?

Tournament operators have the same difficulties. No matter how bright the online championships are, they (with the exception of ESL One LA) can hardly compete in terms of coverage with the largest LAN events, which means it will become much more difficult to attract sponsors. Perhaps this problem can be solved – now F1, football, and NBA have come online, which means that even non-endemic brands will soon learn to trust online tournaments. However, the problems with time zones and the inability to push the best teams of the world (due to ping) on ​​the server are unlikely to be solved, and therefore there is no guarantee that the conditional brand A will choose the Dota 2 championship, and not the race of virtual fireballs that everyone understands.

Another difficulty that arose due to the announcement of Valve is related to timings. Organizing a major Dota 2 event takes time – for example, EPICENTER starts preparing for tournaments 4-5 months before the start of qualifications (!) For them. This means that if Valve still decides to have time to conduct a TI in 2023 and launch an autumn series of events in front of him, then none of the major TOs will simply manage to arrange a full-blown LAN. How ESL and DreamHack will plan budgets in such conditions is a big mystery.

But everyone watched ESL One LA – the public loves online! It turns out that we have nothing to regret?

The situation with the ESL One Los Angeles – Online Championship (as well as the whole battery of tournaments from WePlay !, Parimatch, etc.) slightly masked the problem – the championship gathered a lot of spectators and even beat most of the major views. But I am inclined to believe that this competition just took place at the right time – and with the right composition of participants.

The original ESL One LA was supposed to be the first “full” major of the season. Judge for yourselves: the tops did not play at MDL Chengdu Major at all, and, apparently, only Team Secret, EG and Nikobaby were in top form. For the tournament in Los Angeles, the stakes have risen – a new OG roster has been selected for the competition, Virtus.pro and NAVI finally finalized the rosters for the season, and the Team Aster star has risen in China.

Against the backdrop of the cancellation of this major, the announcement of the tournament of the same name gave the community hope that e-sports could exist online – as if nothing had happened. Add to this the natural increase in viewers who suddenly find themselves in isolation, and here is an almost plausible explanation for success.

However, by the end of this terribly long competition, it became clear that Dota 2 online is not quite the game we are used to. Here is SumaiL with a ping of 200 ms, and here is CCnC, in which the Internet suddenly crashed in the middle of a series. In the playoffs, Secret in the bottom grid was unable to cope with ViKin.gg. What is it? The birth of new talents? I doubt it, because an hour after the victory, the same team was demolished by the composition of Yolo Knight. Such a confusion is fun, but only for a short distance. Tolerate such a game within seven months will only a very unassuming viewer.

Undoubtedly, the abolition of The International is the right move, because people’s health is more important than a game. However, Valve announced this in her inherent disorderly style – forgetting about the mass of small nuances. Until now, such a way of doing business has gone astray, partly thanks to the TO initiative. But now the company still needs to take an active part in the development of the professional scene, otherwise there will be no one to collect the prize pool of the next TI.