Valve Is Moving Away From the Battle Pass in Dota 2

Dota 2's tenth anniversary is being marked with a significant departure from the traditional Battle Pass. In a post to the Dota 2 blog called "Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future," Valve announced that the Dota 2 battle pass had grown "to encompass just about any content we produce for Dota over the year". That created "a tremendously exciting time in Dota," but it meant "the rest of the year felt barren by comparison".

The key argument they are making is that the Battle Pass has taken up a lot of their work, which could have been put in a few game updates instead of the Battle Pass. This indicates that the developers have less time to work on additional features for everyone. The team also shared a concern, saying that "most Dota players never buy a Battle Pass and never get any rewards from it". 

Last year, Valve changed the Dota 2 Battle Pass system, splitting it into two parts and extending the content release over five months. The move apparently helped the company achieve impressive results, as it resulted in significant revenue of $293,024,922 generated from the battle pass in 2022.

Following this idea, Valve decided to take away some developer resources towards more updates to the game. One such change was the recently published New Frontiers update and patch 7.33. The team said that it wouldn't have happened if they were still going so hard on the Battle Pass.

Valve said they're going to continue on this path, building a "wide variety of features and content for the game, delivered in different ways." They are aiming for bigger updates for all Dota players, according to the announcement. As they said: "By freeing Dota's update and content cycle from the timing and structural constraints of the Battle Pass, we can go back to making content in the way we know best: by coming up with fun ideas of all scales and shapes, and exploring them with you". 

You can read the full announcement here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.