Dota 2’s big Compendium 2023 update has been live for more than a day now and players have been vocal in how disappointed they are with the offerings of Valve’s battle pass replacement.
Not only is there an outcry regarding the lack of content, but the prize pool for TI12 is already flatlining to a potential eight-year low for Dota’s flagship tournament.
The TI12 Compendium is the first big step from Valve to distance itself from the old battle pass structure as the developers focus more on diversifying the updates it brings to Dota. It hasn’t been met with positive responses, however, as most of the community is already writing it off already—though there is a group that simply say it “sucks, but Valve is making the right choice.”
Despite that minority, who seem to have at least viewed this update as a necessary step back from previous passes, the majority are speaking with their wallets.
After 24 hours on the market, the TI12 prize pool sat at just $2.39 million—meaning players had spent just under $800,000 on the Compendium. That is more than $1 million behind TI5’s pace and is entirely dwarfed by TI11’s $6.9 million in that same timeframe, which shows the difference in controversy between then and now.
For TI11’s battle pass players questioned how Valve thought it was okay to split it into two parts where most of the most valuable content wasn’t going to launch until part two after the event ended.
Valve ended up turning at least a bit of the narrative to positive buzz by offering free battle pass content, to the point where servers were crashing and the company made a reported $300 million despite TI11’s prize pool snapping a historical 10-year streak.
The TI12 prize pool’s pace would fail to surpass the $18,429,613 total from TI5 and if things go exceptionally poorly could even drop below TI4’s $10,923,977, which was the start of the big swing in prizing for the event series.
As it stands, it isn’t that the TI12 Compendium is a bad update, but rather that there is no incentive for players to spend their money on anything because the rewards for grinding levels are minimal once you purchase one of the two starter packs.
This could change if Valve drops some additional Dota 2 content, but the messaging around it is anything else will come “after the champions claim the Aegis.”
