Update for the competitive scene. Valve announced plans for the DPC season

Valve announced plans for the DPC season in their blog, and also talked about the changes in the DotaTV and Streaming rules.

Moving Forward

Soon after we announced that we were not immediately proceeding with DPC as planned, we received a lot of negative feedback from fans. We think that a lot of the points that were raised were reasonable criticisms towards us, especially because we did not communicate what our intentions were, and what they could expect in the future.

For this upcoming competitive season, there are going to be at least four third party events and leagues in EU/CIS events, three in China, and a few others that are still in the preliminary planning stages and are not able to commit at this time. However, there are still going to be a lot of teams, casters, organizers and fans around the world that are not going to be meaningfully served based on the current trajectory and that is our fault for not pushing on those and supporting them enough.

With that in mind, we’ve started reaching out to many more tournament organizers to offer help and financial support in order to be able to create increased coverage globally for the remainder of the year. We expect that these events will be gradually announced over the remaining season as soon as they are ready to communicate to fans and teams.

Another piece of feedback we got from players as well as fans was wanting more clarity in what we were thinking were the likely dates for DPC and TI to resume. Our outlook right now is that we are anticipating the start of DPC to be in the first month or two of 2021. Our hope is that by the time the first DPC league concludes, travel limitations will be more predictable and spontaneous restrictions will be less likely, thus allowing for Majors with cross-region competition to happen. We are also operating under the assumption that the most likely outcome is for The International to happen in Stockholm in August 2021. While we have other countries as backups, we recognize that fans would be upset if we moved it to another location if the time savings weren’t meaningful enough.

DotaTV and Streaming

We’ve also heard your feedback and concerns around Dota TV streaming rights. This has been a topic we’ve discussed openly in the past and, as we gathered more data, our thoughts have evolved slightly. We ultimately still believe that community streamers providing their own commentary of a tournament is a net positive value to fans and the competitive scene. We also believe that in the long term, the tournament themselves benefit from additional exposure to fans of those community streamers. However, it is true that this can cause a short term loss of revenue as well as a reduced ability to monetize more effectively for tournament organizers. Starting September 15, the Dota license we will be updated to reflect the following: Organizers that run Dota 2 Tournaments will have to provide community streamers with a reasonable and simple to execute set of non-monetary requirements, such as displaying the organizers sponsors on their streams or having a slight delay on the games. Community streamers will be able to use the DotaTV feed in their broadcast as long as they agree to those requirements. We believe this will provide more certainty and confidence to community streamers to be able to cast without a lot of turmoil, while at the same time protecting some key interests that tournament organizers have. To avoid possible last minute issues, we would advise casters that want to stream a tournament, to coordinate with the organizer in advance to ensure they are able to fulfill the requirements presented.