Dota 2 News

Spooky season is well behind us at this point, and while we weren't able to celebrate in-person this year, many of us instead retreated to virtual worlds for our Halloween kicks. Thankfully, from Call of Duty Warzone's 'The Haunting of Verdansk' event to Dota 2's Diretide mode, 2020 has seen some truly excellent seasonal celebrations. The latter has even resulted in a decent surge of players for Valve's MOBA, boosting the game's daily peak players to well above 700,000.

Diretide first arrived to scare us silly back in 2012. It made another appearance the following year, but then - for whatever reason - Valve shelved the mode until its grand return this Halloween. It's essentially a best-of-five showdown where you have to fill up some buckets by nicking sweets from your rivals while avoiding the man-eating Roshan. That last part's easier said than done.

The increase in players seen over the last 30 days in Dota 2 is the first time its player count has risen since April 2020, so clearly the nostalgia of Diretide has tempted a decent number of Dota vets back to the game.

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If you're a MOBA games fan, you'll no doubt be aware that Dota 2's Diretide event has returned to Valve's title for the first time in a whopping seven years. Aside from oodles of Halloween-themed fun for players to sink their gnashers into, it looks like the mode's brought back something else to the game - a lot of players.

Head to Steam Charts (thanks, Dot Esports!) and you'll see the Dota 2 player count has risen significantly over the past month - notably, for the first time since April 2020, shortly after which the multiplayer game's 2020 battle pass was launched. In April of this year, Dota 2's average and peak player counts leapt up from 437k and 744k the month before to 493k and 801k, respectively. Since then, however, the game's players have been ebbing away, with the peak count dropping to 666k in August, and a very similar 670k in September - a drop of around 131k over several months.

However, Steam Charts records that both the average and peak player counts have seen a notable increase in the last 30 days - the first since April (the minor peak figure rise in September notwithstanding).

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RELATED LINKS:

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Dota 2's Diretide event returns for the first time in seven years

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