This year professional Dota 2 players came to one of the largest Canadian cities, Vancouver to fight for the biggest prize in the esports world. Tournament is held from 20th until 25th of August with a prize pool of more than $25 million. The Rogers Arena in Vancouver gathers together enormous amount of cybersport fans as well as players waiting for the winner of more than $11 million to be announced. Wow, is not it?
Cybersport has been rapidly developing for the past years. For instance, the prize pool back in 2011 added up only to $1,6 million while nowadays this figure has grown tremendously. More and more people are engaged in cybersport activities either reading about it at esports portal Egamersworld or starting their professional gamers’ careers. Such games and tournaments have been bringing more people to the stadiums than sports games and if this does not say about the importance of cyber sports nowadays, then what does?
The Largest Prize Pool Ever
However scaleable esports activities may seem, no one has expected the pool for this year Dota 2 tournament to grow that large. This is nowadays the largest prize pool for the cybersport event of one game. Below we will look at how does this pool form and who are the main contributors to it.
To begin with, prize pool stands for the total amount of money that is awarded to competing teams at the event. The winning team receives approximately 47% of the total pool. Second place gets more than 17% of the remaining amount. The Valve Corporation hosts this event and is also one of the main contributors to its pool of reward. This year the game developer has contributed $1.6 million.
Then, nearly three months before the tournament Valve started to sell Battle Passes. Under a battle pass one should understand video game monetization providing additional content for a game thus rewarding the player with some in-game items. Thus, 25% of gain from Battle Passes’ sellings also went to the prize pool making both professional as well as amaetur players happy.
Here are the teams which made it till the greatest stages of the International Tournament 2018:
- LGD (China),
- OG (the EU),
- Team Liquid (the EU),
- Evil Geniuses (the EU).
One of these teams is likely to go home with more than $11 million and great aspirations for further victories and battles. Second and third places will receive $4,029,000 and $2,644,000, respectively. A fair sum of money for the esports competition, one may say. It is indeed. Just as the efforts and professional preparations of the players, such a large sum of prize rewards people for their efforts and devotion.
All in all, the mentioned above annual Dota 2 tournament is nowadays one of the largest and greatest esports events. It brings people from all over the world to compete for the main prize amounting to more than $25 million. We may only guess the size of the pool in the next year. The only thing which is not likely to change is the significance of this event and its popularity all over the world.
