Why won't the prize pool of this TI break the record?

There is a month left before the start of TI11, and the collection of money for participants is not something that does not break records, but rather, on the contrary, it amazes with its failures. There's no secret that about 25% of the entire box office of the largest tournament is a percentage of the sale of the Battle Pass. We believe that it was this compendium that became the starting point in the failure of fundraising and was marked by the loss of the very trend that each new TI beats the records of the previous one. However, not this time and now we will tell you why.

Failed Battle Pass

Starting from the day of release, ending with the quality of the skins and the pass itself, and things went to the bottom. The Battle Pass came out on September 1st, a little over a month before the start of the tournament, while the previous compendiums came out a little over 2 months in advance. It was the deadline of 2-3 months that allowed him to collect many bucks for the tournament fund, the fans replenished his wallet every day. After all, people will not buy what they do not like, here the second factor of the failed BP is included - its quality.

The first thing a player sees when reading the summary of a BP is its expiration date – you can play until January. However, here's the catch, Valve is again being asked to pay for something I haven't seen yet.

Well, no one cancels the fact that the second part will be cool and will justify both the expectations and the funds paid for this exclusive from the creators of the game. It’s also worth including a point about rewards that will become available later, perhaps even after The International is over.

Chinese factor

Quite recently, the Chinese community spoke out quite sharply on this issue with the following theses. Players in China are complaining that every time a few people work on the development team. According to the players, the community donates enough money to the Battle Pass every year so that the company can hire additional employees.

Chinese fans compared Valve to Tencent, where programmers for 1 million yuan (about 145 thousand US dollars) could make all the content from the new Battle Pass in a few days. In their opinion, the content from the new Battle Pass is inferior even to the content from the mobile game Arena of Valor (Glory of the King).

Summing up all this, we can easily say that this BP did not go down well with the fans of the game, this time something new was missing, new items cannot be called cool and this is exactly what you are willing to pay. All this and much more had a strong impact on the pace of purchases of this add-on, and accordingly affected the prize pool of TI itself: it is noticeably lower than before the two previous TIs.

Analysts agree that the total prize pool this year will be about $15-20 million. Of course, this is also a colossal amount, which no other tournament can reach, but there will be no new records.

Is it bad?

On the one hand, yes. This year we will definitely not see a record 50 million or more. This whole fairy tale that TI will someday hit the 100 million mark is also starting to fade.

On the other hand, the reduction in the prize pool of The International is far from a disaster. The amount is still huge and will be a worthy reward for the winners. Perhaps this will be a signal for Valve to start sponsoring other tournaments, so that each game season with several Majors, DPCs and other tournaments will give a record 100 million in total. The only record that Dota 2 fans can beat is the record for views of the entire final stage. We are looking forward to TI11, let it be spectacular. BB!