Valve’s The International ‘Dota 2′ tournament offers the largest eSports prize pool ever awarded, and events like this have the potential to keep growing.
Game studio Valve is giving away over $18 million to winners of this year’s Dota 2 The International tournament on Aug. 8 at KeyArena in Seattle.
It’s the biggest award ever given at an eSports tournament, an event where teams of professional video gamers compete over several days to see who will come out on top. That kind of payout may seem ludicrous, but it’s just a drop in the bucket for the eSports industry, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and growing.
According to Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing at Valve, the viewing audience last year for The International was more than 20 million for the entire six-day event. The event has grown from a small booth at the 2011 Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, to its current home in KeyArena at Seattle Center.
“ESports have been around as long as gaming itself,” Lombardi says. “Over the years, the complexity of games have matured. The audience size has increased. The revenue produced by the industry has exploded. And, along with all those trends of the industry, eSports has also evolved.”
“The production around the event has also become something that is on par with any major sporting event—with many of the same personnel working and trucks parked at KeyArena as you will find behind the scenes of a Seahawks, Mariners, or Sounders game,” Lombardi says. “Our broadcast reach continues to grow from the distribution as Pubstomps (watching the event in bars with friends) became a thing a few years ago. Last year we added ESPN to the mix, and this year we are offering the finals in over 400 movie theaters in the U.S.”
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