So it's the 10 Year Anniversary of Dota 2 (EDIT: No it's not, I was corrected further down in the thread. Sorry!) and Valve's silence about it is very jarring from a company that was once the golden standard for post-launch support and communication. It's especially jarring when contrasted with how Riot handled the League of Legends 10 Year Anniversary with a massive celebration of the game and company with streams, reveals and showcases for new champions, games, TV shows, comics, music and more. Dota 2 was never as popular as League of Legends but it's more popular than pretty much everything else yet it's the game that receives the least communication and outreach and it's even crazier to think that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gets even less attention, especially now that it consistently beats out Dota 2's numbers on Steam.
The template that Valve created on how to talk to customers and support your game and its community has been abandoned in favour of sparse communication, a lack of content and in some cases, strange priorities. One thing that Riot and other developers have done really well is cater to the different segments of the player base, especially those with little to no interest in the competitive aspects of their games. Valve has a noticeably stronger focus on the competitive aspects like the Dota Pro Circuit and International while other games are better at balancing that with making content for casual players in the form of lore dumps, comics, community content, fan service (not for me but it has a place in community building), etc. Dota gets like, one of these a year at this point and it's probably why it hemorrhaged players. There's pretty much nothing for casual players in Dota 2.
There was a glimmer of hope at the start of the year during the lead up to Half-Life: Alyx where it seemed like the old communicative Valve was coming back when they finally figured out how to use social media but they dialed it back real soon after. It is 2020 so there are a number of factors at play but that hasn't stopped every other dev. I guess this is a strange thread to make right after they updated a 10 year old game (though it was all community content) but it's just strange as a Valve fan to see how silent they are compared to other developers. I think their reluctance to adopt modern community outreach techniques and platforms (social media, Twitch Prime rewards, etc) and focusing on eSports/Competitive and nothing else is killing their games slowly (or in the case of Dota Underlords and Artifact, killing them as fast as possible). No one wants to look at their 2012 blog pages.
The template that Valve created on how to talk to customers and support your game and its community has been abandoned in favour of sparse communication, a lack of content and in some cases, strange priorities. One thing that Riot and other developers have done really well is cater to the different segments of the player base, especially those with little to no interest in the competitive aspects of their games. Valve has a noticeably stronger focus on the competitive aspects like the Dota Pro Circuit and International while other games are better at balancing that with making content for casual players in the form of lore dumps, comics, community content, fan service (not for me but it has a place in community building), etc. Dota gets like, one of these a year at this point and it's probably why it hemorrhaged players. There's pretty much nothing for casual players in Dota 2.
There was a glimmer of hope at the start of the year during the lead up to Half-Life: Alyx where it seemed like the old communicative Valve was coming back when they finally figured out how to use social media but they dialed it back real soon after. It is 2020 so there are a number of factors at play but that hasn't stopped every other dev. I guess this is a strange thread to make right after they updated a 10 year old game (though it was all community content) but it's just strange as a Valve fan to see how silent they are compared to other developers. I think their reluctance to adopt modern community outreach techniques and platforms (social media, Twitch Prime rewards, etc) and focusing on eSports/Competitive and nothing else is killing their games slowly (or in the case of Dota Underlords and Artifact, killing them as fast as possible). No one wants to look at their 2012 blog pages.
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