Free to Play

Free to Play (2014) [1] I've enjoyed this documentary a lot. It follow three DOTA players and theirs life prior to 'The International', a first million dollar e-sport tournament. What caught my attention the most, is that, despite the three main characters (Dendi - Ukraine, Fear - USA, hyhy - Singapore) come from very different backgrounds and cultures, they treat the game almost the same - as a way of living. [1] ▶ this video

Valve made a documentary about pro DOTA 2 players a whopping 8 years ago (it doesn't seem that long ago at all). I bring it up because I remember at some point they mention that your reaction time drastically starts to decrease around the late 20's or so. I'd imagine that may also have something to do with it for fast-paced games at least. Here's the documentary (it's kind of more of a commercial but it's still pretty good if you're interested in esports) ▶ this video

I've been watching this game for years, and I can say with confidence that Sumail is the real deal. He has skills that few can match. Right now he's playing the middle of the biggest tournament in e-sports history and he's about 10 games away from winning $6 mil (of which he'll keep $1m). The tournament, organised by Valve has a prize pool that's mostly crowd funded, so its likely to be a steady source of income for the top players of Dota 2 for a few years at least. I guess we'll know by next Saturday what Sumail's fate is. For more info * Free to Play, a documentary about 3 Dota players - ▶ this video [75 mins] * Dota 2, a game that's free to play - link * The International tournament - link If anyone has any questions about this I'll be happy to answer :)

The prize pool for the upcoming Dota 2 tournament is now the largest prize pool ever in esports history, which is why I'm submitting it to HN. It's an interesting new phenomenon, because it seems to indicate that esports may finally be taking off. Valve basically crowdfunded their tournament prize pool. They started out by offering an initial $1.6M prize pool, but gave every dota 2 player the option of buying a "compendium" for $10, and each compendium increases the prize pool by $2.50. That means Valve makes $7.50 per compendium sold. I just ran the math, and as of right now there have been ($3,365,563 - $1,600,000)/$2.50 = 706,255 compendiums purchased. Since Valve earns $7.50 per compendium, that means they just made $5.3M in a couple days. And they're set to make even more next year, since the Dota 2 playerbase has some nice exponential growth: link I'm not sure there are any articles about this yet, because this news is so new. I wish I had a decent article to submit to HN instead of this link. But this is certainly newsworthy, so it's a matter of time before you start hearing other news sources talking about it. EDIT: If you're looking to see what a Dota tournament is like, here are two great matches from last year: Game 1 link Game 3 link The production quality is so good! EDIT2: Also, Valve made a movie called "Free to Play" which documents what life is like for top-tier Dota players: ▶ this video

It runs natively on linux, it's free and bugs, but not source code, are hosted on github. I really recommend watching this ▶ this video just make some popcorn before.