Valve surprised the gaming world last year by hosting the most lucrative e-sports tournament in history, with a prize pool of more than $10 million, and now it has the player base to match it. More than 10 million people now play Dota 2 (at the time of this writing, exactly 10,313,855 players), making it one of the most popular online games in the world. Within its genre, Dota 2 is only surpassed by the insanely successful League of Legends, which at this time last year had around 67 million people logging in each month.
Dota 2 now has over 10 million players
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Dota 2 is part of an exploding market of games known as MOBAs: multiplayer online battle arenas. MOBAs have become popular in e-sports because in many ways they resemble traditional sports arenas; they involve small teams that compete on a consistent field of play, attempting to gain ground to complete objectives. Unlike traditional sports, games like Dota 2 have a dizzying array of possibilities. They’re also very addictive games: just ask The Verge’s own Vlad Savov, who wrote a 1,000-hour review of Dota 2 last year.
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