Those scalliwags at PC Gamer have reported that Dota 2 will be formally released in late summer, before the International 3 begins on the 7th of August.
Erik Johnson, the senior project leader at Valve, confirmed PC Gamer 85’s news in thisemail exchange to a man called Dylan at Valvetime.
My favourite thing about this email exchange is the sheer terseness of Erik’s reply. “That is the plan” is the sigh of a man who has been working on a game for two years and would like for the game he slaves over to be out already, but there is still work to do. It is the sigh of a man who gets a lot of questions and usually gives them out to PC games magazines who ask him about when his game will be out (again, for the nth time) only to have his mailbox fill up with more questions, and meanwhile some hero in DotA is still imba and people are still being douches to each other on All Chat, resulting in their recent ingenious communications ban. (I love that they have effectively done a Journey on mouthy players, so that they can only squeak and grief through game actions rather than through words.)
Good luck to Erik and everyone at Valve ironing out all the final little tweaks. DotA 2 is a fine game and we’re all pretty excited to have it finally released.