CEO Spirit: “Dota esports is really on a downward trend”

The head of the esports organization Team Spirit, Nikita Cheshir Chukalin, spoke about the state of the professional Dota 2 scene. He noted that the main problems are related to the lack of structure in the competitive season. Chukalin shared his thoughts during a Q&A session on Telegram.

Published preserving the spelling and punctuation of the source

[Question: “Is Dota esports really dying due to a decrease in the prize fund at TI and the departure of large organizations due to unprofitability?”] The word dying has a very emotional connotation) Dota esports is really on a downward trend, this can be seen in all parameters, primarily in the audience’s attention to tournaments. As for the reasons, there are a lot of them and many of them follow one after another. The TI prize fund is just a red rag on which it is easy to hang all the failures, but the main problems are the complete lack of infrastructure in the competitive season. In this state, the tournament market has turned into an absolute conveyor belt, where the main task for the TO is to hold as many games as possible in a short period of time in order to satisfy the needs of the business and its sponsors. This is one of the main reasons in my opinion, in fact there are many more. If we talk about profitability, Dota has never been a discipline with a good financial model for the club, there are no royalties from the publisher, no stickers, no revision programs. And it never was. Even in the best years for Dota, the range of clubs here was lower than in CS:GO, so the situation here is quite natural

Cheshir also believes that Valve should not have abandoned the Dota Pro Circuit system. According to Chukalin, the current state of the discipline is the result of this decision.