It’s been a week of milestones for Dota 2, which is appropriate given that it’s only just been released and the biggest tournament in eSports history is only a week away now. But still, most of the numbers are really big, and each of them is an achievement in its own right.
Firstly there’s the amount of unique players per month, which started out at under 4,000,000 back before the official launch of Dota 2, and has now blasted past 5,000,000 in less than a month. Admittedly, a whole bunch of those players will probably bounce off the game’s prickly exterior/interior, but that a million new players have tried out the game is a pretty impressive statistic.
And it comes with an increase in concurrent players, which pushed past 400,000 in the past week to almost laughably look back at every other game on Steam and all but challenge them to add up their individual concurrents together and still barely manage to reach Dota 2’s lofty numbers.
Then there’s the prize pool for The International, inflated with every sale of the Compendium, which pushed past 2,600,000 last week unlocking an immortal item for every owner, and now sits comfortably a few thousand over 2,700,000. Unfortunately there’s no stretch goal target for that particular number, but if the community can manage to add another 500,000 by the end of the tournament in a fortnight then they’ll be able to dictate to Valve which hero they’d like ported next. It’s a pretty high goal to reach, but the tournament proper begins this weekend, and it’s sure to drive sales faster than anything since the original rush during the qualifiers.
All that’s left to do now is look at progress graphs, rub your chin, and then speculate wildly. That, and make sure that your Compendium predictions are rock solid.