Why Dota 2 Keeps Losing Players
Dota 2 used to have more than 13 million active players. These days, the number is somewhere between 7 and 10 million. And that has been the case for the past 5 years.
This game, despite offering some of the best esports tournaments in the industry, has a serious growth problem and many believe that its player base is quite old. One often wonders why.
What We Know For Sure
In 2022, Dota 2 experienced a lot of growth thanks to four factors.
The first was Manuel “Grubby” Schenkhuizen’s decision to start playing and streaming the game.
Being a Warcraft 3 champion and a former StarCraft 2 professional player, he rapidly got a lot of attention from the Dota 2 community and much of his native audience became interested in this MOBA. Grubby was often coached by top tier players like Sebastien “Ceb” Debs.
The second reason why Dota 2 did well for a while in 2022 had to do with Riyadh Masters, a $4 million tournament that offered lots of spectacular matches and popularized the game in the Middle East.
The third reason was the Dota 2 anime, called DOTA: Dragon’s Blood, whose third season aired on Netflix.
The fourth reason was The International 11, which had a massive prize pool of $19 million and was held in Singapore. For this part of the world, Dota 2 probably generated a lot of interest, at least for a few months.
Valve CorporationThe game went from having 450.000 average concurrent players at the end of 2021, to 524.000 average concurrent players in November 2022. And then it lost more than 10.5% of its player base in just one month.
Right now, the game is back to 475.000 average concurrent players, but it’s more likely that it will be back to 450.000 by the end of the year than to 550.000.
Why Dota 2 Is Losing Players
In recent years, Valve has done a poor job of advertising Dota 2 via its esports side. The company does no real advertising at all for this game. But 4-5 years ago, it used to care a lot about its esports side and the tournaments served as a form of advertising.
Nowadays, making money as a Dota 2 team is really hard. You’d have to qualify for The International or at least a Major and finish in the top 8, which is difficult.
Valve CorporationIf no new players are coming in, the game will naturally lose a significant percentage of its player base each year because people are aging and giving up on games at a certain point. They simply have too many adult responsibilities to sustain their gaming habit.
Another important reason why Dota 2 is losing players has to do with its enormous complexity and the lack of proper tutorials. A newcomer will need at least 500 hours just to grasp the basic concepts. In most cases, people give up. Most games require less than 5 hours to understand what’s going on.
Header: Valve Corporation