The Future of Dota 2- How they can engage new players

 

Dota 2 can be a daunting game to any newcomer, so how can Valve ensure continuous player growth? Let’s take a deeper look.
A special community

The Dota 2 community is very special. Over the years there have been many occasions that highlighted the fact that the average Dota 2 player only cares about one thing: The game of Dota 2, all while being oblivious to anything else. For example, when Blizzard’s Overwatch was first realized every game on steam saw a sudden drop in its players, since everybody wanted to try out Overwatch. Yet Dota 2 was the only game to avoid this temporary player drop. It was just like the average Dota 2 player had never even heard of Overwatch.

This tendency for the Dota 2 community to only care about themselves, does however have some pretty adverse effects. For years now Dota 2 has seen a slow decrease in its player base, while barely any new players seem to be joining. In March 2016 Dota 2 had the biggest amount of concurrent players in its history, at 1.29 million people. It has only been going downhill ever since, right now even sitting below half a million concurrent players. A number way too low for a game with such a massive history and strategic depth. What can Valve do to get this number up?

Also read: Dota 2 versus League of Legends: Different yet the same?

Advertising

Valve’s view on advertising is very different than most other companies. While you have Blizzard, whose marketing is often better than the games themselves with cinematics that many people would pay for on their own, being used as marketing assets. Valve doesn’t really do any marketing at all. Instead relying on the philosophy that if you create a great product, people will notice it anyhow, wanting to put all their resources in providing the best product, instead of taking resources away for the marketing.

However when your game has been around for more than ten years, and many people still have never heard about it. While its player base keeps dropping. You might want to start rethinking your strategy.

Also read: Dota 2: What’s going wrong over at Team Elephant?

The Learning Curve

If you are learning a new skill, you often have to go through a so-called learning curve. In a way, learning to play a video game is the same as learning a new skill and as you might be able to imagine, not every video game is as easy to learn. Resulting in very different learning curves for different games.

Dota 2 might have one of the steepest learning curves in the world. For trying to understand a game with a hundred and nineteen heroes, with all at least three abilities and of course two hundred and eight items that all interact with each other, might be a bit of a challenge. Especially with “When everything is OP nothing is OP” being its philosophy. Making it so that one little mistake can be exploited incredibly hard. For this reason many people say Dota 2 has less of a learning curve, and more of a learning cliff.

The new player experience

With getting into the game of Dota 2 being so hard, one can see that the few new players that do exist stop playing very quickly. Especially when they tend to be playing with people who have been playing for years already. With so few new players, it is really hard for matchmaking to make them play only against each other. With Dota 2 lacking a robust tutorial system, these problems only become bigger. So what Dota truly needs is a big influx of new players so they can face each other and a robust tutorial system making the learning curve less daunting.

Dragon’s Blood

A few days ago netflix announced a new series coming to its platform. An animated show set in the Dota 2 universe called Dragon’s Blood. This show might have been exactly what Valve was waiting for. Now is the time to revamp the new player experience. For people who have not heard of Dota 2 before or never got into it, the show might be a game-changer. As it sparks interest for the Dota 2 video game, this might create the big influx of new players the game so desperately needs.

If valve manages to release an update to Dota 2’s tutorial system at the same time when the show releases, we might see a great surge of people joining the Dota 2 community. Creating an enjoyable new player experience and making these people actually stick around, to conquer Dota 2’s skill cliff, never to come down from that incredibly hard to reach summit ever again.

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Image Credit: Valve
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