For the first time in its history, Valve’s International Dota 2 Championships will be held on Canadian soil.
On Thursday, Valve announced it will hold its annual Dota 2 tournament at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena. The week-long tournament will start on August 20th, with the Aegis of Champions, the Stanley Cup of professional Dota 2 play, being awarded on August 25th.
Since 2012, the International has been held in Valve’s home town of Seattle, first at Benaroya Hall, then at the city’s KeyArena. Rumours that Valve planned to host this year’s International in Vancouver started to percolate last year.
Thanks to the patronage of Valve, which owns the PC video game distribution platform Steam, and the generous Dota 2 community, the International is one of the most prestigious tournaments in all of esports. In 2017, the tournament’s final prize pool was $24,787,916, with Team Liquid, TI7’s eventual champion, taking home more than $10 million in winnings.
Dota 2 is the standalone sequel to Warcraft 3 mod Dota, short for Defence of the Ancients. The original Dota help spawned the multiplayer online battle arena (MoBA) genre that give birth to games like League of Legends (LoL) and Heroes of the Storm (HotS).
Tickets for the tournament go on sale on March 23rd via Ticketmaster.ca, with two different tickets types available. Priced at $125 CAD, the midweek ticket grants attendance to the first four days of the tournament, while the $250 CAD Finals tickets grants access to the last two days of the tournament.
More information can be found on the company’s ticketing FAQ.
Source: Valve
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