Dota 2 caster slams Valve for prioritising The International's prize pools

A former pro player and current caster for Dota 2's esports scene has warned that the current prize pools for The International are threatening the existence of lower leagues, all because Valve apparently want to match Fornite's World Cup Finals.

Kyle 'melonzz' Freedman posted a long and heavily detailed article on Medium explaining how much the prize pool has increased in the last few years, this year's being the biggest in TI history. He goes into the history of TI and how its prize pools have slowly gone up year on year as the esport grew in popularity.

In drawing the comparison between last year's first place prize for TI and this year's, melonzz has theorised that the huge jump is in response to Fortnite's esports prize pool, explaining that "It's no surprise that Valve would want to reward their winners with the most $ in all of esport... and a 44% cut might not have been enough to beat Epic's $3,000,000 first prize." This may be fuelled by player numbers too, as "Fornite saw its playerbase increase by 100 million since their World Cup. Dota's has declined 20% since TI 9."

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