Like it or not, the fact is that there are hundred thousands of people out there who prepare a few hundred dollars each year just to splurge on dota-related contents like the battle pass.
Battle pass sales in previous years hit close to US$300 million in sales (that’s why prize pools could hit $40million+).
But this year, the US$300 million that people prepared to splurge on dota? They spent it on other things instead because there’s nothing worth buying in terms of Dota content
I won’t pretend to know what is happening with Valve behind the scenes, but the sad reality is this year Valve for whatever reason decided to simply forgo this USD$300million in revenue/profits.
And of course less profits means less money for game development, it’s common sense. So by failing to earn this easy money, it feels to me like it would really hurt the future development of the game.
I mean all they had to do was recycle the cavern crawl, invest $1 million into making two quality arcanas plus 10+ immortals (surely $1million can easily achieve that?), make some sprays/balloons/fluff and BAM, USD$300 million in the pocket.
Makes 0 sense to me but hey what do I know, I guess the people making the decisions know better than me
Valve is only searching for multi-billion dollar ideas.
While 200 or 300 million seems big to us, to them they’ve basically capped out TI’s maximum profit and it’s cheaper or easier to just automate and outsource as much as possible and make it a passion project for employees who want to work on it.
I guess we truly don’t understand what they are working on or what they spend most of their time doing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/ya6khm/interview_with_an_exvalve_employee_on_how_200/
https://youtu.be/Cm9l0VgyadA