Valve released Dota 2, the MOBA in April 2013. After the release the game managed to stay on the top of the steam charts without any hassles. In March 2016 game amassed 1.29 million concurrent gamers .
But after that it was all a downhill ride. The game slowly started to lose players and started losing to PUBG and even CS:GO. Again in March 2020, Dota 2 peaked with around 750,000 players while CS:GO reached new milestones at about 1.2 million concurrent players. This is almost 60% more than that of Dota.
The reasons for the decline of playerbase can be accounted to the increasing complexity of the game after every update and lack of new stuff to get players engaged with the game. It can be made out that Icefrog isn’t doing a good job to implement new stuff in the game.
Icefrog is adding huge changes in every patch, especially the ones after every TI. But this only increases the complexity of the game . The new comers get frustrated when the game they spend so much time learning is changed so much in a single update. Since there are less number of new players, the game will gradually lose its player count and eventually die out.
Fans are anxious about the future of the game. Dota is a title that has marked an era of MOBAs in the world, and seeing it die out would be heart-breaking to any person whose childhood was made up of this game.
So these are some of the potential things Valve could do that might end up saving this game. A campaign based on lore would be effective. This campaign can also act as a potential tutorial for beginners. Reimplementing the item drops can actually attract the players. Giving more advertisement for the game is another way of attracting the players to the game.
We all know that the Dota 2 tutorial is subpar at best. The tutorial gives new players only a basic idea of what the game is about. A detailed tutorial can attract more players to the game.
Valve can certainly take steps to minimize the number of smurfs and boosters in the game by preventing them from getting matched with new players.
We can certainly expect the Valve may come up with some good changes in the future.