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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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Dota 2 obsessed Saudi prince has spent over $40,000 on the Battle Pass


Dota 2 obsessed Saudi prince has spent over $40,000 on the Battle Pass

You remember this guy, right? A few months back, we reported that a Saudi Arabian prince blew over $20,000 in two weeks levelling up the Dota 2 TI10 Battle Pass, and the big spender is still pumping thousands into it.


While the rate of spending has certainly decreased, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, has dropped a whopping $44,783 into the Dota 2 Battle Pass so far, according to Stratz, solidifying his position as the Pass' biggest spender at the time of writing. Because of his extremely wise investment, the prince is now level 107,573. We didn't know numbers could go that high...


While the Crown Prince is certainly the frontrunner on the leaderboards, he is being shadowed by another Dota 2 player who has been throwing equally absurd amounts of money at it. A Chinese account - which with a rough translation has the rather poetic username of 'Out of dust into dreams' - has spent just shy of $30,000, but is a measly level 71,380.


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