DOTA 2 invented the golden cow of Free2Play games, now slaughter it – make a better game

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In 2013, DOTA 2 introduced the Battle Pass as the 1st game. In 2018, Fortnite made him famous. Since then it has been in practically every Free2Play game. But now DOTA 2 is also the first game that deliberately refrains from this monetization method. Valve says: The Battle Pass has become so big that it eats up all resources. You don’t want that anymore.

What is a Battle Pass?

  • A Battle Pass is a relatively cheap item that you can buy in a game’s shop: It’s a kind of “treasury, the doors of which open little by little”.
  • The player must actively play a game and collect experience points there or complete matches in order to advance further in the Battle Pass and unlock new rewards, which are mostly cosmetic in nature.
  • The item serves as an alternative to subscriptions or loot boxes, so it should help to finance the further development of a live service game. In the meantime, however, the Battle Pass has become so popular and is considered such a “golden cow” for games that it simply migrates to full-price titles, such as Diablo 4.

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    This is the story of the Battle Pass: The Battle Pass was introduced by DOTA 2 in 2013. Back then, he came on the occasion of the big tournament “The International 2013”: 25% of the proceeds went into the tournament’s prize pool.

    The “Battle Pass” concept only became really popular in 2018 with Fortnite. It was estimated that Epic sold around 5 million Battle Passes at Free2Play in a single day, raising $50 million.

    The breakthrough of the “Battle Pass” as the preferred means of monetization was fueled by growing complaints and concerns about loot boxes because of the ignorance of the rewards they receive. With a Battle Pass, this is foreseeable in advance.

    Battle Pass eats up too many resources

    What does Valve say now? In a new blog post, Valve has now announced (via dota 2) that after a decade of DOTA 2 and Battle Pass, they have learned that the Battle Pass has become too big and is causing problems.

    According to the developers, the Battle Pass has become a massive thing, consuming almost all of the time, ideas, and resources of the team working on DOTA 2.

    So you have no more ideas and time for other things:

    Realizing this, we made a conscious decision earlier in the year to do a little experiment: put some of the resources normally earmarked for the development of Battle Pass content into updates we didn’t know how would resonate with the community, including new features and content that doesn’t fit into a Battle Pass. While work is still ongoing on future updates, the first of these has already been released: the New Horizons gameplay update, or 7.33, would not have been possible if we had only focused on developing Battle Pass content.

    So the new update “New Frontier” and 7.33 only came about because you focused on it instead of the Battle Pass.

    The disadvantage of a Battle Pass is that most players would never have bought it.

    Now the response to the new patch is so good that they have decided to build fewer cosmetic items for the Battle Pass and put more into the updates.

    DOTA 2 is the biggest game on Steam after CS:GO. The patch the developers are talking about was huge indeed:

    Steam: Valve Delivers Huge Update To LoL Rival DOTA 2, Enlarges Map By 40% – “Welcome To DOTA 3”

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