Dota 2 is doing rather too well for a game that hasn't been released. According to Steam stats, it's the second most played game on Steam right now, ahead of Counter-Strike: Source, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Skyrim and lots of other games that have actually been released. Dota 2 is currently in an ever-expanding beta that's been running since late last year.
Back in September, Dota 2 dev IceFrog posted on the Dota 2 site to say that Valve had decided to speed up work on Dota 2 after the success of The International tournament. The original beta plan had been to keep the game in beta for a year to get the roster up to size. Given how well the beta seems to be doing that might not be such a bad plan after all.
Here's a graph built using Steam Graphs showing Steam player stats over the last few days. At peak times in the US Counter-Strike: Source and the king of Steam, Counter-Strike 1.6, retain the upper hand. Dota 2 overtakes both during those downtime hours, which suggests a strong, growing international community.
Fans on Dota 2 Reddit have spotted a blog post by Chinese esports team DK E-Sports which suggests they're among the first to be invited to the Dota 2 International 2 Seattle Invitational tourney, which is exciting. Valve have said that the sequel to last year's very successful Gamescom competition will have a prize pool of at least $1.6 million. We'll hopefully get to watch it using Dota 2's lovely spectator tools.
Are you playing Dota 2? What do you think of the beta so far?
