Dota economy vs Mavia economy

Dota 2 launched in 2012 and immediately began actively attracting players around the world, the online growth and valve found 2 main tools to attract a new audience. The first tool is the world's largest eSports tournament with huge prize pool, the second tool was in-game economy, which allowed people to earn money playing Dota. In this article we will take apart Dota economy and what led to its decline and then show on the example of the Nft game Heroes of Mavia how it was supposed to work.

Back in 2012 people used to play Dota for the fun of it and to get in-game items. Back then, after finishing a match you could get an item or a chest that later could be sold in the Marketplace. Each chest was opened with a key, which later became the main trade object on the user's Marketplaces. This period was just around the dawn of the custom Marketplace.

The best user marketplace at the time was the dota 2 lounge. The site worked like a noticeboard and any user could post an item and request what they wanted in return. The system was simple, both users had to be online and agree to an exchange in the platform's chat room. A huge number of users traded in-game items on this site, thus developing both the Dota economy and Dota itself. 

Naturally, the success of this platform left no one uninterested. Clone projects began to appear, and after that, roulettes. The bottom line was simple, users played roulette for real money and with a certain chance, they could get a thing that they could sell on the Marketplace. Everything was fine at first and the economy continued to grow and develop, but the music did not play for long. Many kids started using parents’ cards for the next game of roulette. Their parents were not happy about it. But they did not want to take responsibility for this in any way.

Valve became the source of hate and a huge number of lawsuits from disgruntled parents and users forced Valve to take action. The company did not want to pay out a lot of money to a huge number of customers who simply spent their cash. Therefore, in order to justify themselves, Valve took all measures to show their negative attitude towards such staff in every possible way. They restrict access to content, and after that, chests or items that could be traded on the Marketplace were completely removed from the game. Of course, Valve won the court, but the economy in the game died forever, turning into a banal system of skin buying. Thus, one of the best and strongest in-game economies was ended. But how can this be avoided and is there an alternative?

For example, let's take the game Heroes of Mavia, the main core of the game is the in-game economy, which attracts a huge number of users to the project. In the game, the users will be able not only to exchange, buy and sell items within the Marketplace but also to earn them in the game itself.

Let's start with the market. In NFT projects, the market is completely decentralized and does not receive any regulation from the developer company. Prices and market policies are determined by the users themselves. This means that Mavia developers will not be able to restrict access to the purchase or sale of in-game items. The scenario in which Valve banned access to roulettes simply would not be repeated in this game.

Another plus is that any user can legally withdraw money by paying taxes. What is attractive to a larger solvent audience. In addition, not only users will be interested in this segment of the economy. Projects like Mavia will immediately attract a huge number of investors, which will increase the speed of reaching the audience.

And finally, the gaming community will be able to influence the process itself. For example, in Heroes of Mavia, the community itself promotes the project by inventing content, since it is beneficial for them. Compared to Valve, they forbid the community to bring items from the workshop into the game and make decisions all alone.

In summary, we can say that it's only a matter of time before the NFT market wins the race. And blocking NFT by steam only increases the belief in this. Games like MAVIA, Decentraland or Sandbox will take almost the entire audience away from session games and Dota 2 will be no exception.