Dota 2 Dropping Its Battle Pass Because 'Most Dota Players Never Buy' It

ign.com:

Dota 2 is hitting its 10th anniversary this year, and Valve is doing something no other game dev has done for their live-service games: getting rid of the Battle Pass.

Valve detailed its future plans for Dota 2 in the game's official blog post on Monday, which included ditching the battle pass system. According to the company, most Dota players never buy the battle pass, and if they did they never get any rewards from it other than discovering new maps, playing with new items, enjoying UI improvements, and even accidentally dying to a Tormentor.

"Most Dota players never buy a Battle Pass and never get any rewards from it," Dota 2's development team wrote. "Every Dota player has gotten to explore the new map, play with the new items, and accidentally die to a Tormentor; every Dota player benefits from UI improvements and new client features. Community response to New Frontiers has helped us build confidence that working less on cosmetic content for the Battle Pass and more on a variety of exciting updates is the right long-term path for Dota as both a game and a community."

As a result, Valve is removing the battle pass system, which originated from the annual Dota 2 tournament called The International. The Dota 2 development team claims that it became a yearly content update that usurped the dev team's time, ideas, features, and resources that would've otherwise been used for updates that were more frequent during the game's infancy. In other words, the Battle Pass grew to the point where it would be the biggest event of the year while the rest of the year had no new content updates whatsoever.

"When we recognized this, we made a deliberate choice earlier this year to run an experiment: to take some of the resources that