An invitation beta will begin after Gamescom, and then a public beta will start. Valve will worry ”how we’ll monetise it” after that. Dota 2 ”much an ongoing thing.”
”We’ll just go into progressively wider and wider distribution. I don’t think it’ll be shipped until next year,” said Valve boss Gabe Newell. ”But then with a game like this, you just keep shipping. You add new heroes. You try out new game modes.”
”You are constantly tweaking item and hero balance. It’s very much an ongoing thing.”
IceFrog, one of the original modders for Defense of the Ancients is attached to Valve’s Dota 2 project. A business model is yet to be determined for the game.
”We don’t have a plan,” he said. ”IceFrog has a bunch of testers he’s worked with as long as he’s been doing development. The first thing we’ve been working with is addressing their concerns. We’ve been through four or five different versions of the user interface, getting it to the point where we’ve addressed the feedback we’ve got from those guys.”
”For us now, this tournament is a really good step. A bunch of the features we’re building in the design of Dota 2 related to being able to put on a tournament like this. There’s a bunch of stat stuff. There’s a bunch of website development, support for simultaneous, four-language broadcasting,” he continued. ”This was the next step.”
Team Fortress 2 is now a free-to-play game from Valve but Dota 2 might not follow in those footsteps. ”We don’t know. We don’t have plans yet,” Newell said. ”The problem isn’t to figure out what your monetisation strategy is. If you have something with a super careful monetisation strategy and it sucks, it doesn’t matter.”
”The most important thing is to do something that resonates well with the existing Dota players and creates a vehicle for new players to join into the community. That’s the hard problem. That’s the interesting one to solve.” Do you play the Dota mod?
The community for Dota and Blizzard were uneasy that Valve trademarked the Dota 2 name, and argued that really if anyone could lay claim to it it’d be Blizzard.
