Cheshir: "Canceling the DPC was a huge mistake and I was very disappointed when I saw the event announced"

CEO of Team Spirit Nikita 'Cheshir' Chukalin, as part of an AMA session in the comments of his personal telegram channel, shared his opinion about the extinction of e-sports in Dota 2, named the shortcomings of the competitive system, and also commented on the departure of Tundra Esports from Dota.

[Published with the original spelling and punctuation preserved]

[ Is Dota esports really dying due to a decrease in the prize pool at TI and the departure of large organizations due to unprofitability? ] The word dies has a very emotional connotation. eSports in Dota is indeed 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.

[ What is the biggest thing missing from Dota esports right now, primarily from Valve? ] Clear tournament infrastructure. Canceling the DPC was a huge mistake and I was very disappointed when I saw the event announced. Instead of refining the system, adding entertainment to it and adapting the schedule, a very weak choice was made to “let go of the reins completely”; the unregulated market does not always find the most optimal solutions at a distance. We are now reaping the results.

[What do you think about Tundra Esports leaving Dota? Will there be many more cases like this in the future? ] I think Tundra's case is a consequence of some changes in the sponsorship structure in the fall of 2025, and their delayed demise is more likely to be part of a series of folding of other clubs in the recent past, GUN5 and so on. I don't think this is part of some new trend.

Earlier, Dmitry 'Korb3n' Belov said whether it was a shame to lose the Esports World Cup 2026, spoke about Team Liquid's dependence on the form of Michal 'Nisha' Jankowski, and also named the required rank to get into the zone of interest of academic teams.