This is the first part in a new series looking at contemporary multiplayer gaming and the e-sports phenomenon.>

Since Steam’s inception, just a handful of marvellous gems have topped the Steam Stats page. Games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Sid Meier’s Civilization V have earned accolades, snared players in their thousands, and then hovered around the 50,000 mark. For Valve’s Dota 2, now just wrapping its beta period, that figure currently sits at 500,000 concurrent users (not including China and South Korea). Five hundred thousand!>

More users play Dota 2 simultaneously than the nine other ranked games combined and it is only going up from there. Why? (more…)

We live in strange times. Food chains are trying to poison us, we can probably save lives by putting heads on dead people’s bodies, and games can corral a million-gajillion players without ever being “released”. Madness. Nothing makes sense anymore. Civilization has been replaced by a steaming crater of contradiction. And while those first two things have much further-reaching, highly disturbing implications, this is a videogame site so let’s talk about the last one. DOTA 2‘s beta ran for two years>. During that time, it dominated all lanes of Steam’s most-played list because people like MOBAs a little bit maybe. But now – finally, amazingly – Valve Time has aligned with Real Time for a brief, shining moment. DOTA 2 is out. Oh, but you might still have to wait if you want to actually play. Why? Because – as I said earlier - nothing makes sense anymore>.

(more…)

In my day, kids used to actually play videogames, you know. Now they just sit around watching other people play them. Disgraceful, it is. They’ll never develop life-long RSI and lower back problems that way. They’ll probably still get the limited attention span thing, of course.

It’s going to get even worse now that Twitch, market leader of such inactivity, has officially gotten into bed with Steam, market leader of selling the games that people gawp at on Twitch. Now those kids don’t even have to load up two seperate services. They can just sit there, staring at the same webpage forever. Down the mines with them all, I say. (more…)

Look at me, I’m a Dota 2 player! I just killed my first… Cara, is that a creep? Hooray, I killed a creep! And now I’m going to something something the other somethings. Oh, alright. You got me. I am a fraud. I’ve had Dota 2 on my PC for six months now, and all I’ve ever managed to do was watch a few matches and click around on the interface. It’s brick wall to me. A beautifully animated and intriguing brick wall, but nonetheless rather stubbornly impassable. But with Valve about to launch the game to everyone and anyone, they’ve just added an honest-to-glob tutorial, adding plenty more sections to the paltry single map that served as an introduction. Did Dota 2 just become welcoming? (more…)

When they’re not spinning around and around in their expensive chairs, weaving hats, or thinking up other ways to not make games that people want (“Shall we all got to Hawaii this week, or shall we crack open that HL3 design document?” “Aloha! Aloha! Aloha!”), Valve’s brain drones are at least attempting to create a community of people that can earn a living from making and contributing to games. Sometimes it’s a bit broken, like Greenlight is right now. Other times it can be so successful that Valve can afford to share the wealth between organisations that contributed to the success, but had no way to monetise their involvement. So now, when a community item in Team Fortress 2 or Dota 2 is sold in either game’s store, it’s possible for some of Valve’s take to be directed to the likes of Blender and Polycount. Ooh, just thought up a new word for it: Valvetruism. (more…)

It’s true! The screenshot has probably already spoiled the surprise but, yeah, it’s DOTA 2, a game that I already have installed on my PC and once had twenty invites for. Despite the access I have been granted to the long-running beta, the only things I really know about DOTA are the nuggets of information in RPS posts. For example, I know that a ridiculous number of people play every day but the League of Legends community still outnumbers them a billion to one. I also know that there’s a tutorial and that it is a terrible tutor. Maybe that’s one of the things that will be improved this summer when the beta becomes brave, truthful and unselfish, and transforms into a real game?

(more…)

It’s time to look at what $20 will actually get you in the landscape of “free” to play gaming. What does it actually mean? And what is that crisp, all-too-real twenty actually worth in various imaginary economies? In the first of an ongoing series we sent Cara off to do some shopping in DOTA 2. Just what could she get for twenty bucks?>

Daddy RPS said he’d give me this $20 note to shop with, but what happened was RPS was out of change that day and so RPS patted me on the head and said “Okay off you go, go and buy yourself something nice in a Free To Play and we will reimburse you.” Challenge Accepted. I gathered the Fashion Police, which largely resembled a troupe of models from Zoolander (Tom, Alice, Dan, Philippa and I all have razor sharp cheekbones) and we went shopping with Daddy’s money. Which I hope Daddy actually has or this may be some sort of elaborate prank…

(more…)

Update: Riot have poured cold water on DFC’s somewhat dubious report, asserting that they see over 500,000 concurrent LoL players in the US and Europe alone (as opposed to Dota 2′s 300,000 odd globally). Riot tell me that DFC “is in the process of pulling their press release promoting this report.” So LoL very much remains king of MOBA castle, whichever angle you look at it from.

An invite-only sequel to a free Warcraft mod is how the West was won. That’s the claim, anyway, but so long as Valve keeps its internal figures locked up there’s no entirely reliable way of knowing exactly who’s playing what in PC-land. League of Legends has, of late, been hailed the most-played PC game in the the Western World, but the DFC Intelligence PC Game Meter (via GamesIndustry) has used assorted surveys (primarily of Xfire’s apparent 23m users) and magick to determine that Valve’s Dota 2 has now overtaken it. A victory for Valve – except LoL is actually far, far bigger than that. (more…)

Even those who are less knowledgeable about MOBAs than they’d like to be but plan to rectify that as soon as humanly possible (IT’S ME, OK FINE JEEZ IT’S ME OH GOD I’M SUCH A MESS) know this much about DOTA 2: it’s the hard> one. Thus far, League of Legends has paved my road to vague competence with copious pointers, helping hands, and utterly heroic shoves in the right direction, but DOTA’s idea of a red carpet involves my blood. Lots of my blood. So Valve’s decided to change that. Well, a little, at least. The storefront, hardware, and fuuuuuture> creator that occasionally develops games has added an in-game tutorial to its arena battling opus. But this is just the beginning, and it wants your help.

(more…)

There are quite a few communities bustling away in the General Sociability forum, and some of those have produced of videos of their antics. I’ve embedded just a few of those below. There are many more, and I am sure others still I haven’t seen.

Are you> doing video stuff with the RPS community? Link your work/play in the comments! (more…)