Dota 2 is hitting its 10th anniversary this year, and Valve is doing something no other game dev has done for their live-service games: getting rid of the Battle Pass.
Valve detailed its future plans for Dota 2 in the game’s official blog post on Monday, which included ditching the battle pass system. According to the company, most Dota players never buy the battle pass, and if they did they never get any rewards from it other than discovering new maps, playing with new items, enjoying UI improvements, and even accidentally dying to a Tormentor.
“Most Dota players never buy a Battle Pass and never get any rewards from it,” Dota 2’s development team wrote. “Every Dota player has gotten to explore the new map, play with the new items, and accidentally die to a Tormentor; every Dota player benefits from UI improvements and new client features. Community response to New Frontiers has helped us build confidence that working less on cosmetic content for the Battle Pass and more on a variety of exciting updates is the right long-term path for Dota as both a game and a community.”
Most Dota players never buy a Battle Pass and never get any rewards from it
As a result, Valve is removing the battle pass system, which originated from the annual Dota 2 tournament called The International. The Dota 2 development team claims that it became a yearly content update that usurped the dev team’s time, ideas, features, and resources that would’ve otherwise been used for updates that were more frequent during the game’s infancy. In other words, the Battle Pass grew to the point where it would be the biggest event of the year while the rest of the year had no new content updates whatsoever.
“When we recognized this, we made a deliberate choice earlier this year to run an experiment: to take some of the resources that would normally produce Battle Pass content and instead put them towards more speculative updates, including features and content that couldn’t fit into a Battle Pass,” Valve said. “While work is still in progress on future updates, the first of these has shipped: New Frontiers and patch 7.33 couldn’t have shipped as they did if we were focusing all our efforts on producing Battle Pass content.”
Valve mentioned that Dota 2 will still have content that is tied to The International and its prize pool, but players won’t have any new skins or other accessories to grind for. That update is set to release in September.
Dota 2 is one of the first free-to-play games of the last decade to introduce the concept of the battle pass system, with Fortnite and Rocket League taking the lead. It is also the first to retire it, which is a major shift considering how common battle passes are, even in games that aren’t free-to-play, like For Honor.
Cristina Alexander is a freelance writer for IGN. To paraphrase Calvin Harris, she wears her love for Sonic the Hedgehog on her sleeve like a big deal. Follow her on Twitter @SonicPrincess15.
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