Dota 2, short of Defense of the Anceints, is MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) created by Valve Corporation. It is a free to play game. Development of Dota 2 began in 2009, when the developer of the DotA mod, IceFrog, was hired by Valve as lead designer. Dota 2 has now daily peaks of over 800.000 concurrent players.

Valve invited and sponsored sixteen of the most accomplished Dota teams to play at the International tournament that was hosted at Seattle and Washington in 2012. Prize was set at one million dollars. It was held during the popular Pax Prime event. In its third year prize pool was over 2.8 million dollars. It was the largest prize pool in electronic sports history, beating League of Legends from Season 2. The 4th of the International took place at KeyArena in Seattle. Chinese team NewBee won the overall prize $5,028,308, largest amount of money in professional gaming competition. And the prize pool continues to grow. Every copy of the Compendium, the virtual playbook, costs $10, $2.50 of which goes straight into the prize pool. Of the $10.9 million, Valve only put in $1.6 million, and the rest came from fans of the game.

Esports Earnings is a site where you can find a lot of eSports tournaments with all of the prizes and players and their earnings. From the list of top 100 largest overall prize pools first 2 of them are from Dota and last 3 are from League of Legends. First 7 spots hold these two games, and then on 8th spot is Call of Duty Championship 2013 with $1 million prize pool.

Another old debate surrounding eSports has also dissipated: Is eSports a real thing? Two days before the ESL One, German gaming tournament kicked off, the same stadium was filled with German soccer fans watching the U.S. versus Germany World Cup match. There were 15.000 people there screaming and cheering. Two days later Dota 2 came to the stadium and it had almost the same effect. Some people ask if eSports are real sports. That question doesn’t matter anymore. If you can bring 15.000 people to watch the best players in the world competing, who cares what you call it!