How Dota 2 Remains One of the Most Played Games Even After 10 Years

Dota 2 is set to turn 11 this year. Despite its old age, it remains one of the most popular games on PC with an extremely dedicated community and some of the biggest Esport tournaments of all time. Read on to find out why Dota 2 is still thriving.

How a Ten-Year-Old Dota 2 Remains One of Today’s Most Played Games

Background

Dota’s Beginnings

Defense of the Ancients (Dota) started out as a wildly popular mod for Warcraft 3 in 2002. In fact, it was a global phenomenon that pioneered the MOBA subgenre of games. People just couldn’t get enough of the strategic 5v5 action, the beautiful complexity, and the extremely replayable gameplay loop of destroying each other’s Ancient. However, there were always limitations as it was only a mod, and it was technically Blizzard’s intellectual property, which meant that it couldn’t be monetized by its creators.

Battle of the MOBAs

Dota 2 was released 4 years after Riot Games’ League of Legends came into the scene, setting the stage for the MOBA rivalry between two of the genre’s best. League of Legends is undoubtedly the more popular and more played game, evidenced by League of Legends having around 150 million monthly players and Dota 2 having a peak concurrent player count of almost 1.3 million players according to esports.net. However, Dota 2’s dedicated community, massive tournaments, and consistency in being one of Steam’s most played games every year prove that the game is something special.

Before Dota 2 came along, Riot Games took inspiration from Dota and, along with some of the original Dota developers, created a much simpler MOBA in League of Legends (LoL) in 2009. The game shared the same objective as Dota, which was to destroy the enemy’s base defended by the opposing team, towers, and waves of enemy minions. Additionally, League of Legends modernized outdated Dota mechanics and features, like replacing the separate shops with just one centralized shop, cosmetics, and a better-looking game in general.

Dota 2 vs League of Legends Differences

League of Legends simplified and removed a lot of the complex things that made Dota such a big hit in the first place. The skills and abilities of each League of Legend character are much simpler in contrast to the complex tools each Dota hero has. Activatable items are also rare in League of Legends, and certain key mechanics like denying your own minions, stacking camps, and a night/day cycle were all notably absent from League of Legends. League of Legends was and still is a huge success.

A common saying in the MOBA community is that League is more micro compared to Dota which is more macro. Micro refers to one’s individual mechanical play while macro refers to the grander scheme of things, affecting the entire map. Of course it's more nuanced than that, but LoL has a really punishing laning phase as opposed to Dota's early game phase where support players can go around the map freely to help lanes. It looked great, was fun, and was definitely easier to learn than Dota, but it lacked the complexity that brought the original Dota to great heights.

Dota 2 as a Game

Beautiful Complexity

Dota 2 released and was very much like a modernized version of the original Warcraft 3 mod. Like League of Legends, the goal is to destroy the Ancient found in the enemy’s base. However, that’s where the simplicity ends. Everything about the game is so complex, which is something that fans of the game love, but overwhelms less experienced players and discourages them to continue playing. LoL is also complex in its own right, with complicated mechanics like animation cancels and mechanically challenging legend specific combos. It’s not simple, but isn’t anywhere nearly as complex as Dota.

Compared to Dota 1, Dota 2 is a lot more user-friendly. The controls were improved and you didn’t have to download third party softwares to change the hotkeys. They also centralized their base shops, but kept the secret shops. Dota staples were also back like its large cast of activatable items, couriers, and Roshan. Additionally, the graphics looked so much better than its predecessor.

We say that Dota is more complex for a number of reasons. One is because every hero (playable character) is somewhat overpowered in a sense, loaded with powerful tools to help their team win. Next is the complex mechanics present, like creep pulling, where you pull a camp of neutral monsters towards your wave of allied creeps and let them fight. This denies your opponent of gold and EXP that they would’ve gained if they fought the creeps instead, and also serves to make the opponent’s wave crash at your tower, allowing for safer farming. Another mechanic is high ground, which improves accuracy and vision if you’re above opponents, but hinders both when you’re on low ground. One last example would be couriers, which are primarily used for delivering items to allied heroes and purchasing items from the secret shops. Back then, each team only had one courier for each team, so teams would have to strategically discuss who should get their items delivered first (or fight over it), unlike today where each player has their own.

Strong Cast of 124 Heroes and Over 200 Items

Dota 2 boasts a large cast of heroes you could play as. Each one is unique, designed well, and is complete with lore and a backstory. As mentioned above, each one is somewhat overpowered in a sense. For example, Spirit Breaker can charge at enemy heroes anywhere on the map with his Q ability, stunning them on impact. This can be done as early as level 1. Another example is Bloodseeker, whose ultimate ability is called rupture. When you are ruptured, you take damage for every little movement you do. Getting ruptured is almost like a death sentence, with there being only a few counters for the ability, like teleporting back to base. Each hero looks, sounds, and plays unique from everyone else. With its vast roster, there’s surely a hero whose kit best fits how a player wants to play.

The items in Dota 2 are also much more complex than in LoL. For instance, there’s an item that grants invisibility, one that lets you blink almost an entire screen away every 15 seconds, and one that grants spell immunity for a few seconds. There are also some consumables like wards for vision, sentry wards to detect invisible units, and Smoke of Deceit to grant your team AOE invisibility for ambushes. League of Legends has some complex items as well, like Duskblade of Draktharr, which makes its user untargetable for 1.5 seconds after taking down opponents, and Zhonya’s Hourglass, which turns its user into gold upon activation, granting invulnerability but also disabling them from moving or attacking.

Because Dota 2 is so inherently complex, the possibilities are endless in this game and each match is completely different from the last one. Of course, there’s a ridiculously steep learning curve. It’s regarded by many as the hardest game to learn, but the grind is definitely worth it.

Free-to-Play

Dota 2 is truly free-to-play, with the complete absence of pay-to-win mechanics. Heroes are all free from the get-go, unlike in League of Legends where you have to pay for them with your in-game currency or real money. You could spend on battle passes, cosmetics, sound effects, and in-game taunts, but those don’t really affect the game.

Dedicated Development Team

It’s been almost 11 years since Dota 2’s official release. Despite that, it’s still the 2nd most played game on Steam. Part of it could be that the game is just that good, but a big part of it should be attributed to the developers and how they manage to shake things up whenever things get too stale. Balance changes cause meta shifts, new characters join the roster, items and abilities get reworked, new mechanics are introduced, new items are added, and big map changes are always present in big patches. One of the most notable changes came last year, when the developers introduced the new map, which was 40% larger than the original, but made the game fast-paced thanks to new traversal mechanics. Another big change was the addition of couriers, with each player now having one each instead of each team sharing one. This undoubtedly made Dota better, as one of the most annoying issues in casual/ranked games was when teammates would fight for control of the courier. The Dota 2 devs deserve more credit than they get for being able to keep an aging game exciting.

Dota 2 as an Esport

The International

It’s not surprising how Dota 2 holds some of the biggest Esport tournaments in the world. In fact, the very first iteration of the prestigious The International (TI) came before the game’s full release. To everyone’s surprise, the very first TI had a whopping $1.6 million prize pool, which undoubtedly drew everyone’s attention, given how that was by far the largest prize pool in an esport event. This made Dota 2 a highly anticipated game with already a very strong presence before its release.

TI grew and grew in terms of viewership and prize pool as the years went on. Its prize pool of $1.6 million during the first TI grew to $34 million in TI9 (2019), and then $40 million in TI10 (2021), which to this day remains as the top two largest prize pool in esports history. TI10 also had a peak viewer count of 2.7 million, which was the highest in Dota history. The top ten biggest prize pools in esports history is dominated by Dota 2, which holds 8 of those spots, the other two belonging to Fortnite. Additionally, Dota 2 is consistently among the most-watched games online. Dota is able to raise the prize pools to absurd amounts of money by allotting a part of the proceeds from battle passes to the prize pools. However, this was reworked recently, resulting in a relatively low prize pool of TI 12 in 2023 of only $3.1 million.

Dota 2 is able to consistently gain large viewership counts of their esports events thanks to the dedicated community Dota 2 has built. Additionally, it works well as an esport because it shares a lot of similarities with actual sports. NBA champion and Dota enthusiast Jeremy Lin said in Valve’s Dota Documentary entitled Free to Play that it’s very similar to basketball, in the sense that there are two teams of five working together to achieve a common goal, utilizing each one’s strengths as a team to win.

Dota 2 Will Continue to be Great

Dota 2 is and will continue to be one of the top free-to-play titles of the modern gaming era thanks to the game’s complex nature, extremely fun gameplay, its strong cast of heroes, its perfect implementation of free-to-play microtransactions, and its incredible professional scene. Dota 2’s dedicated community remains satisfied as the game is constantly evolving, thanks to the game’s developers who ensure that things don’t go stale. While it’s not as popular as League of Legends, it has undoubtedly captured the hearts of many, and has rewarded its most skilled players with life-changing amounts of money.

Steven V. Santos

A big fan of video games in all its forms. Especially passionate about competitive esport titles (LoL, DOTA 2), shooters (COD, CS), and sports games (NBA 2K, EA FC, UFC). Self-proclaimed NBA 2K GOAT.