Dota 2 is moving away from the battle pass model as Valve says there are better uses of dev time and most players 'never buy' one anyway

pcgamer.com:

Valve is celebrating Dota 2's tenth anniversary with a major break with tradition. Although the game has received a battle pass (originally called a Compendium) to accompany and fund the prize pool for every year's International tournament, Valve has decided there won't be one this year. In fact, it's dramatically ratcheting down how much it focuses on battle pass content in general, and pledges instead to focus on other, more regular updates that can be experienced by the entire Dota 2 playerbase.

In a post to the Dota 2 blog titled «Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future,» Valve said that the Dota 2 battle pass had grown «to encompass just about any content we produce for Dota over the year». That created «a tremendously exciting time in Dota,» but it meant «the rest of the year [felt] barren by comparison».

So Valve ran an experiment. The studio took development resources that would, in any other year, have gone towards developing the battle pass for The International 2023 and «instead put them towards more speculative updates, including features and content that couldn't fit into a Battle Pass». That experiment bore fruit in the form of Dota 2's New Frontiers update, the patch that was so big it made the game «basically Dota 3 now,» in the words of PCG's Jody MacGregor.

«Most Dota players never buy a Battle Pass and never get any rewards from it,» said Valve, but «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». The positive community response to the New Frontiers update has given Valve «confidence that working less on cosmetic content for the Battle Pass and more on a