Valve postpones Dota 2 tournament The International until further notice

The International, an annual Dota 2 tournament and one of the largest global esports events, has been postponed. The tenth edition of the annual tournament was originally scheduled for August and was to be held in Stockholm.

Valve says it was a difficult decision to postpone The International. The company made that decision “after a comprehensive consideration of the global emergency arising from Covid-19.” The developer indicates that it has investigated all kinds of possibilities for new data, but that it eventually concluded that it is obvious that the event will be postponed to next year. So there will probably be no edition of The International this year. Valve expects that it will not be able to communicate definitive new data in the short term.

The company behind Dota 2 also reports that it is in the process of restructuring the Dota Pro Circuit for next fall, although Valve has no further information about that at this time. The Dota Pro Circuit is a competition established after The International in 2017 and allows esports teams to accumulate points, after which the teams with the most points are eventually invited to The International.

Valve will maintain the system where a portion of the proceeds from the new Battle Pass for Dota 2 will go directly to The International’s prize pool. For the tenth edition of The International, it again concerns twenty-five percent of the proceeds of the upcoming Battle Pass. According to Valve, that will take a while, because the team behind Dota 2 works from home and things therefore take longer to complete.

Thanks in part to this system, The International’s prize pool has been considerable in recent years. In 2017, it came in at about $24.8 million and a year later the counter was stuck at $25.5 million. The upward trend continued last year, when the total amount exceeded 30 million dollars. The winning team does not pocket that entire amount; for example, when Team Liquid won in 2017, it took home $10.8 million.