Dota 2 is more than its esports scene, and will live on with or without it

With the recent departure of fan favorite South American esports organization HEROIC from the professional Dota 2 scene, there’s been a lot of doom and gloom regarding the game all over the internet lately.

It’s completely understandable; after all, HEROIC had been on the come up since their breakout performance at The International 2025 (TI14). Adding Santiago “TaiLung” Agüero Gustavo gave them an edge that few other middle-of-the-pack squads had, and it seemed for a while that it would only be a matter of time until they hit that next level.

Instead, they’ve been left out in the cold by their former benefactors. They’ll be scrambling over the next few weeks to find someone that might pick them up — but even if they do, I can certainly empathize with people who come away from this sudden news with the notion that Dota might actually be dying.

But is it, really, at least as a game?

Still alive

On its own, without the professional scene propping it up, Dota is still very much in a healthy spot in terms of the number of concurrent players. The game definitely isn’t in its heyday anymore when we used to see more than 1 million players logged in at the same time back in 2015 and 2016, but it still commands a respectable amount of attention to this day.

According to SteamDB, Dota peaks these days at around 600,000 or so concurrent players at peak hours (around 11am ET). I don’t think I even need to say that these are really good numbers for any game that’s 15 years old and counting, even if they are half as much as when Dota was at its most popular. Competitive multiplayer titles come and go, but there just isn’t anything like Dota.

It won’t matter whether Team Falcons, Team Liquid, or whatever “blue chip” esports organization you could think of will still be around or not to compete in Dota in the near future. As long as the game is fun and provides an experience that you can’t get anywhere else, it will continue to thrive as a competitive title. After all, Dota 2 itself (and the original DotA Allstars) predates the major esports boom of the 2010s — and it will surely outlive esports if the industry ever goes belly up for good.

But only just

That said, it is also pretty clear that Valve no longer cares about Dota the way that they used to. Ever since they first abolished the annual International Battle Pass — something that they created first in terms of the larger gaming industry as a whole — it’s just not been the same.

Upon announcing their desire to move away from the Battle Pass model three years ago, Valve mentioned that they were making this decision to spread the attention on Dota 2 itself more evenly throughout each year — but since then, they’ve not really delivered on that promise. Yes, they’ve since gone on to make absolutely amazing in-game events like Crownfall and Aghanim’s Labyrinth, but for every one of those, there’s another lukewarm batch of skins in Quartero’s Curios.

The Battle Pass is never coming back, for better or worse. Coupled with the fact that Steam makes Valve literal billions without their employees having to even lift a finger, and it’s very easy to see why it feels like Dota is a barren wasteland in terms of content outside of the core gameplay these days. There is simply no incentive for them to bother with making a yearly Battle Pass, if they could just sit on their asses and watch hundreds of millions of people buy games on Steam every day.

This is actually why I am personally shocked that Deadlock even exists. I have long held the belief that Valve has had no reason to make anything ever since Steam became as popular as it is now, so seeing them actually do that again with Deadlock (and to a lesser extent Half-Life: Alyx) really surprised me. I don’t think I’ll ever be that interested in the game personally, but just the fact that it’s even there still kind of blows my mind.

Valve does what Valve wants

But I digress. The point is, with Valve’s flat corporate structure and fully private ownership, it’s just inevitable that some of their games and/or business ventures might get abandoned without much warning. They don’t answer to any investors, and so the entire company can just work on whatever they want, whenever they want — Dota 2 included.

This extends over to the esports side of things, which doesn’t make Valve nearly enough money for them to justify keeping things going. There’s a reason why they abolished the Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) in the same year they discontinued the International Battle Pass, and have since “outsourced” the production of competitive events to tournament organizers like ESL, PGL, and BLAST.

Why should they get their hands dirty, if it means a measly few hundred million in profit compared to what they rake in by selling games, right? The company just marches to the beat of its own drum, and unfortunately, the Dota 2 esports scene is suffering for it. Nevertheless, Dota will keep on going as a game, even once all the pro teams decide that it’s no longer financially viable to compete.