Valve straight-up refusing to hire people that are responsible for something that has nothing to do with development. In this case, people who actually take care of the Esports Scene of the game. I mean Valve did not even want to hire Slacks as Community Manager. And i don’t remember who it was, but someone said in the past that even Tier 1 Teams often struggle getting in touch with anyone at Valve if something important comes up.
Whenever Valve cancels something, be it the Battle Pass, the DPC or whatever it also usually comes down to them not having people to take care of it and Valve sadly does not hire people for specific jobs. Like if the UI Designer for Dota leaves, Valve won’t start looking for a new one. If the guy that took care of DPC besides doing some programming work leaves and nobody replaces him, then the DPC simply dies (doesn’t have to be the reason why it got canceled but just as an example).
If Valve had an Esports Department, things would have been less messy and more structured in the past 10 years for sure. Someone with more than 3 brain cells would probably have said “Lets do not use those 40 Million the community gathered for TI alone, but for the whole season, including Tier 2 Dota so upcoming talents can make a living too”. Sadly this is never gonna happen. The past has shown a few times that Valve rather let their games die than trying to find people to work on them. Its honestly a miracle that we made it this far with Dota.
They couldnt separate the fact that their passion project had become too big, too complicated, and too person intensive for some janitor to handle on their break between second breakfast and lunch.
No, the real problem is that e-sports as a whole is grossly unprofitable and not sustainable. Fine for the company that owns the game, as it’s a loss leader, not great for every 3rd party or investor that bleeds money.
Look at the LCS and how tightly managed and subsidized (by both VC money and Riot themselves) it was. Complete shit show.
Valve earned a lot of money from crowdfunding TIs, this money is more than enough to sustain DPC, majors, TI and employees
Thing is it is a lot of effort for relatively low pay for them comparing to revenue from Steam or other sources, so it’s not really good “cost-benefit” for them. Hiring a huge team to dota only would also be against Valve’s “ethos”
Yes, esports in general have a juge problem of sustainability, but Valve has a product that can self sustain
Local man when he discovers crowdfunding and spending most of your development time making hats with more assets than actual big content releases is horrifically unsustainable
True and i still have no idea why they would get rid of that. Like 2020 Valve made 120 Million profit with the Battle Pass on top of the 40 they had for TI. This is enough to develop like 3 AAA Games.