Most of the gaming world might be paying attention to E3 right now, but there’s plenty going on outside of the annual conference. And there’s plenty of money outside of E3, as funding for Valve’s latest annual Dota 2 tournament shows.
It’s coming up to the 30-day mark since funding for The International began. The International has raised over $US30 million over the last three years, and this year’s tournament has raised over $US10 million already.
This graph is from a handy site that tracks crowdfunding for The International, while comparing it to previous years. The beige-ish line is funding for last year’s International, while the purple line tracks how much people threw at Valve in 2014.
The general trend is about the same: most of the money raised happens within the first month. Last year’s International raised over $US8 million in the first 30 days, with the remaining $US8,429,613 pledged over the following 61 days. The contrast was even more stark in 2014, although the popularity of Dota 2 has risen substantially since then.
If you’re looking at the graph and thinking, “Hey, that’s just under $US12 million” — you’re right. And that’s because that figure includes the $US1.6 million base prize pool that Valve puts in to get things started. So with that factored in, crowdfunding for 2016 is around million ahead of this time last year.
Not a bad effort, really. Question is: will this year’s International break $US20 million?
Comments
One response to “Don’t Look, But The International’s Prize Pool Is Already Massive”
Reddit’s collaborative estimation of the final prizepool is somewhere between 22 and 24 million so it’s very possible that it will breach 20 million dollars crowdfunded.
Woo, big fucking deal.
Sorry, but the International’s prize pool is a real sticking point for me, because it’s constantly brought up by Dota 2 fanboys as another reason why Dota 2 is “better” than LoL- because clearly a much bigger game company hurling huge amounts of money at a tournament and siphoning off money from microtransaction purchases made by the playerbase to inflate it further affects the actual quality of the games. Just pisses me off.
Dota2 > LoL