Tag Archives: Dota 2

The natural evolution of TI4’s Compendium: microtransactions.

As of this post, the Valve’s The International 4 Dota 2 tournament has a prize pool of over $3.7m USD. The record-shattering amount is due to Valve’s innovative crowdsourcing technique: selling hats.1 In this case, the hat in question is the Compendium, a $10 item that helps users contribute directly to the prize pool of the game’s biggest esport event. This year, the Compendium isn’t just an item that builds the game’s prize pool, but it unlocks features for its owner.

Feature Image - DOTA 2The TI4 Compendium adds the ability to reward the player for playing the game as they normally would, as well as for participating in TI4 meta events, such as a newly established Fantasy League. Points added up yield visible effects for the player’s characters in game as well as unlockable content only available through the leveling up the item.

However, another complementary feature of this year’s Compendium includes microtransactions that facilitate purchasing points for the item’s levels.2

Screen Shot 2014-05-12 at 8.57.44 AM

With this, it’s no longer possible to infer any sort of metric about the amount of folks who bought into and contributed to The International’s prize pool. This distortion is due to players’ new ability to purchase points towards their Compendium rather than multiple Compendiums to further increase the prize pool for the tournament. More stretch goals will be reached this year, thanks to this new venue that allows players to contribute.

In addition to how much the prize pool is raised thanks to Compendium sales, it’s also now more difficult to calculate how much revenue Valve generates per sale—remember, $7.50 from each Compendium goes directly to Valve and not the prize pool. It’s probably the first esport event on a scale this large that actually comes close to turning a profit for its organizer based on event-based revenues alone.

Based on the fact that 25% of all purchases go towards the prize pool, and the prize pool was initially $1.6m, that means that $2.1m came from the 25% contribution. But for a game that has 8m MAU and making the assumption that all sales come from that $2.50 portion of the Compendium price, that means over 10% of the game’s user base is active enough to buy into a freemium game. I’m curious if the real numbers can support the case that Valve actually profits from holding one event a year.

  1. The chart in this graph explains everything. ↩
  2. Straight from Valve’s TI4 Compendium site. ↩

Another day, another esports scheduling crisis averted.

A short message posted to Twitter this past Tuesday could have turned the middle of next June into an interesting threesome for competitive gaming.

The announcement was regarding Major League Gaming’s Spring 2014 finale, traditionally hosted in Anaheim, CA, informally referred to as MLG Anaheim 2014. In the past, this event is one of the biggest live spectator events in esports and an event that I’ve personally attended in 2012 supporting ESFI’s on-scene coverage of the event. It was awesome.

And then, one of their European counterparts looked at their calendar.

The Dreamhack representative went on to reference this press release published in May 2012, two years in advance and also mentioned that the date was included in last year’s post-event release for Dreamhack Summer 2013.

Slasher, reporting for Gamespot, was the first to publish the story in a relatively proper context. Most notably, he made the mention that the date also conflicted with another favorite video game industry pastime—the 2014 Electronic Entertainment Expo.

With hints from Twitter posts following Adam’s informal announcement, one could conclude that there would have been some backchannel discussions taking place between MLG and the Anaheim Convention Center crew, and, presumably, the publisher/partners who would be lending their games to the show to find an alternative date.

Today, only two days after the initial announcement, a revised announcement was made via the MLG executive’s Twitter account:

Not a bad turnaround for an organization that seemed to be losing favor with parts of its audience because of the company’s switching games based on business decisions. Personally, I don’t have a problem with MLG playing favorites when it comes to making money and keeping their business afloat so long as they don’t start fixing tournaments or begin catering to a younger audience for the sake of advertising dollars. It’s a business decision and they want to create some cool entertainment that a wide-sepctrum audience can watch and enjoy, and maybe even pay for.

All of this is more impressive when you consider the following, as SirScoots points out:

I don’t think that MLG simply called up the folks responsible for scheduling the Anaheim Convention Center out and politely asked for the dates they previously arranged to have changed without a legally compelling reason, unless Blizzard or another publisher was at the table with them. I could be wrong about that, but my read on the situation is MLG had to work pretty hard to change the dates for the convention center deal they made for this next summer and the public was clued in by MLG’s SVP out of a need to appeal to their potential audience that they no longer have to decide between one of the best produced events in the business and one that isn’t. It comes down to business.

Though I also would have thought that Twitter isn’t exactly the best way to publicly announce something as big of a deal as MLG Anaheim 2014. I could be wrong about that, too.

What does MLG have to lose with TF2?

Update 1: 2 August 2012

Every time I try to build an argument that Major League Gaming is a disingenuous corporate entity in the United States esports scene, I feel like I can’t commit to publishing it.

Sure, there are indicators that set off alarm bells such as that whole pay-per-view debacle for its Arena events, but I feel pretty damn guilty every time I finish writing something up. Moreover, the pieces are all complete rants and opinions many of them not backed up by facts and more based on intuitions and comparisons, and for the most part, it wouldn’t be fair to compare MLG to an organization that’s been doing it better for longer, like DreamHack.

I just can’t not give them a chance. Also, I enjoy using double negatives.

MLG has this GameBattles property that’s been operating in the shadows for a while. Essentially, it’s a service that allows pubstars of console FPS games to shine their brightest. The strong point of the service is the long list of games that it supports.

MLG recently released a feedback website 1 and asked its customers (their viewers and GameBattle users) what they would like to see the company improve on. It’s divided into a few different sections, but there is a voting mechanism that ties in throughout the entire site. Users can vote on proposals submitted to the site and ideally, higher voted ideas get more consideration. Here are the top suggestions from GameBattles users from earlier this afternoon:

Notice how the top three ideas here all have actions from important people in these communities. A vice president responding directly to customers about ideas and subordinates confirming that ideas submitted to the community are being actively pursued.

Compare those three GameBattles ideas and action that MLG has taken on them to the top four ideas on the site overall:

 

Not only do these four threads represent the majority of votes casted on the site, but they’re all titles created and published by one Valve Software, a company that MLG has stated that they have been in talks with before to bring their games to the circuit with nothing to show for it to date.

Going through the list for conflicts, Dota 2 is the only title with a conflict when considering that Riot just threw a ton of money to MLG for the League of Legends tournament to replace Halo as the popular third tent pole in MLG’s events next to its current roster of StarCraft 2 and a three-hit combo of non-Capcom fighters (Mortal Combat IX, King of Fighters XIII, and Soul Calibur V). Publisher commitment and financial help is the biggest reason Dota 2 will play second fiddle to LoL for MLG’s attention. Valve has plenty of faults, and being careful with how they give out rights to their games to other companies is one of them.

I think that getting a commitment out of Valve is one of the most difficult things to do, especially outside of submitting a game to be listed on Steam. Valve’s culture seems to have shifted lately to become a company of thinkers and not so much a company of game developers. With Meet the Pyro finally shipped and two more games getting ready to see the light of day, I fully expect them to rest on their laurels until Q2 2013. But back to the point of this post…

Counter-Strike and Quake are the fathers of great multiplayer competitive gaming. Quake made mechanics, reflexes and situational awareness all essential skills for players to have and Counter-Strike added a higher level of strategy in addition to offering more than one way to win a round with the introduction of the de_ game mode. I would be on board with re-introducing MLG’s audience to the wonder of this style of FPS, but I’m not sure that the audience is particularly there for it.

Team Fortress 2, a free-to-play game that caters to casual players and to a ever-budding competitive scene, is Valve’s playground. TF2 is kept on its toes and many of the features that have come to Steam have been first developed for use through this game. Why wouldn’t MLG want to be a part of that legacy?

You wouldn’t need much to get TF2 going. Hell, have you seen this guy 2 shouting YAOOOO into a microphone before?

 

eXtine, TF2 royalty and amateur cat photographer

eXtine, TF2 royalty and amateur cat photographer

This guy is the king of TF2 when he’s not taking Instagram pictures of his cat or working. From what I can tell, he has singlehandedly kept the game afloat in times where ESEA doubted continuing supporting the game—and hell, even I gave up on it at that point, taking a break from gaming completely for awhile. He goes nuts over having any sustained number of viewers because he’s all about having fun bringing high-level TF2 to players who have no concept of what it means to play competitively.

On top of having an established community who want to see the game progress, you have the years of experience that all of the players have from different leagues. MLG has the opportunity to take the players’ feedback and really create a tournament that players will want to focus on and practice for.

Basically, what I’m saying is MLG(not a large investment) + TF2 + eXtine + BYOC LAN = a success waiting to happen. They have the votes from the folks asking for it, and since the other games might not be viable options, why wouldn’t MLG want to give TF2 a shot?

UPDATE 1

TF2 is over 11,000 votes. Halo has come out of no where and is just hundreds of votes behind it. 1.6 and Dota 2 are in third and fourth place on the website. Still no official MLG response.

  1. Feedback for MLG ↩
  2. eXtine runs eXtelevision.com and tweets from @eXtelevision. ↩