Dota 2 unlikely to ship before 2012, says Valve
Sure to disappoint fans, Valve has stated that it’s highly unlikely that Dota 2 will land this year. The sequel to the extremely popular mod of Warcraft III is being developed by the original creator IceFrog in association with Valve. A Gamescom tournament is currently underway and the developer intends to launch a public beta soon after the tournament ends.
“We’ll just go into progressively wider and wider distribution. I don’t think it’ll be shipped until next year.” Gabe Newell said to Eurogamer.
He further added “But then, with a game like this, you just keep shipping. You add new heroes. You try out new game modes. You are constantly tweaking item and hero balance. It’s very much an ongoing thing.”
As expected, the game will be distributed exclusively on Steam, but Valve has yet to decide a business model. Interestingly, when the question of a Free to Play adaptation was raised, Gabe didn’t omit it out as a possibility.
“We don’t have a plan,” said Gabe. “IceFrog has a bunch of testers he’s worked with as long as he’s been doing development. The first thing we’ve been working with is addressing their concerns. We’ve been through four or five different versions of the user interface, getting it to the point where we’ve addressed the feedback we’ve got from those guys.”
“For us now, this tournament is a really good step. A bunch of the features we’re building in the design of Dota 2 related to being able to put on a tournament like this. There’s a bunch of stat stuff. There’s a bunch of website development, support for simultaneous, four-language broadcasting.”
“This was the next step.”
Then came the inevitable question of whether DotA 2 could adopt a Free 2 Play model, similar to Team Fortress 2.
“We don’t know. We don’t have plans yet,” said Newell. “The problem isn’t to figure out what your monetisation strategy is. If you have something with a super careful monetisation strategy and it sucks, it doesn’t matter.”
“The most important thing is to do something that resonates well with the existing Dota players and creates a vehicle for new players to join into the community. That’s the hard problem. That’s the interesting one to solve.”
Judging by the publisher’s track record, we’re sure the much anticipated title won’t set you back the price of a full game. Regardless, we’re sure the gamer will be well worth the wait.
Thanks Eurogamer.
