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The Dota 2 Pro Circuit will “likely” resume in early 2021

The DPC has provided an update on The International, the Dota 2 majors, and community casting all at once

Competitive Dota 2 pros and fans have been grumbling for the past months over Valve’s silence about the Dota 2 Pro Circuit and its uncertain future. The DPC has finally broken that silence in a blog post that explains some of its rationale and provides a rough idea of what to expect in the pro scene moving forward.

In a post titled ‘Update on Competitive Scene‘, the Dota team outlines the impact COVID-19 has had on planning this year’s The International competition. It became clear in the spring, the team says, that The International would have to be delayed, but the hope was to hold the championship as soon as it was feasible.

Over the course of the summer, the team found that it was going to take longer than expected to be able to hold The International. Even without opening the event to an in-person crowd, the Dota Team says holding an in-person event for competitors was important to maintain, and with teams located all over the world, it could become impossible to travel to any specific location at a moment’s notice as restrictions on international travel could be imposed unexpectedly at just about any time.

The Dota team says the upcoming season will feature at least four third-party events and leagues based in the European/CIS region, three in China, and several others still in the planning stage. Valve says it is “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.”

At this point, the Dota team hopes to be able to start the DPC back up in January or February of 2021, with The International tentatively scheduled for August in Stockholm.

Streamers and DotaTV

The Dota team also offered some guidance on community streamers using DotaTV tournament feeds. “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”, the team says. “We also believe that in the long term, the tournament[s] themselves benefit from additional exposure to fans of those community streamers.”

The issue that’s come up has been tournament organisers have trouble selling advertisements and securing sponsorships for events that are streamed for free by community streamers. To address this, the Dota team says that as of September 15, the Dota license will be updated to require tournament organisers to provide streamers with “a reasonable and simple-to-execute set of non-monetary requirements” for streaming tournament games, such as including sponsor logos or agreeing to a slight delay in their broadcasts. “Community streamers will be able to use the DotaTV feed in their broadcast as long as they agree to those requirements,” the Dota team says.

While fans and players seem glad to have heard something from DPC after a lengthy silence, a few have pointed out that the language in the solution to the streamers vs. tournament organisers is vague and still leaves the issue in the laps of streamers and organisers – they’ll have to hash out what ‘reasonable’ and ‘easy to execute’ actually mean in practice.

While they do that, we’ll be reviewing our handy list of the best free Steam games, looking for something to fill time until the quest for the Aegis of the Immortal begins again.