In 2013, DOTA 2 introduced the Battle Pass as the first game. In 2018, Fortnite made it famous. Since then, it has been included in almost every free-to-play game. But now DOTA 2 is also the first game to consciously refrain from this monetization method. Valve says: The Battle Pass has become so large that it consumes all resources. We no longer want that.
What is a Battle Pass?
- A Battle Pass is a relatively inexpensive item that you can buy in a game’s shop: It’s like a “treasure chest, whose doors only gradually open.”
- The player must actively play a game and earn experience points or complete matches to progress further in the Battle Pass and unlock new rewards, which are usually cosmetic in nature.
- The item serves as an alternative to subscriptions or loot boxes and is intended to help finance the development of a live-service game. Meanwhile, the Battle Pass has become so popular and is considered such a “golden goose” for games, that it also simply migrates into full-price titles, like in Diablo 4.
Fortnite earned $5 million in a day with Battle Pass – Since then, everyone does it
This is the story of the Battle Pass: The Battle Pass was introduced in 2013 by DOTA 2. It was launched on the occasion of the big tournament “The International 2013”: 25% of the revenue went into the prize pool of the tournament.
The concept of the “Battle Pass” truly became popular only in 2018 with Fortnite. It was estimated that Epic sold about 5 million Battle Passes during the free-to-play game in a single day, generating $50 million.
The breakthrough of the “Battle Pass” as the preferred means of monetization was fueled by increasingly strong complaints and reservations against loot boxes, as users do not know what reward they will receive. With a Battle Pass, this is predictable in advance.
Battle Pass consumes too many resources
What does Valve say now? In a new blog post, Valve announced (via DOTA 2) that after a decade of DOTA 2 and Battle Pass, they learned that the Battle Pass has become too large and causes problems.
According to the developers, the Battle Pass has become a massive thing that consumes almost all the time, ideas, and resources of the team working on DOTA 2.
Therefore, they have no ideas or time left for anything else:
When we realized this, we consciously decided at the beginning of the year to try a small experiment: We allocated part of the resources that are normally dedicated to developing Battle Pass content to updates, of which we did not know how they would be received by the community, including new features and content that do not fit into a Battle Pass. While work on future updates is still ongoing, the first of these has already been released: The gameplay update “New Horizons” or 7.33 would not have been possible if we had only focused on developing Battle Pass content.
Thus, the new update “New Frontier” and 7.33 only came about because they focused on it instead of on the Battle Pass.
The drawback of a Battle Pass is also that most players would never have bought it.
Now, the response to the new patch is so positive that they have decided to create fewer cosmetic items for the Battle Pass and invest more into updates.
DOTA 2 is the biggest game on Steam after CS:GO. The patch that the developers are talking about was indeed massive:
