Competition

Professional competition

To ensure that enough DotA players would take up Dota 2 and showcase the game's capabilities, Valve sponsored sixteen accomplished DotA teams to compete at The International for a one million dollar prize. The International became an annual championship tournament, with the venue changing to Seattle, Washington, United States.In 2012, the tournament was hosted during PAX Prime, with Chinese team Invictus Gaming going on to defeat the defending champions, Natus Vincere. In its third year, The International had a prize pool of over $2.8 million, thus reclaiming its previous title as having the largest prize pool in electronic sports history from League of Legends (at the Season 2 World Championship). The 2013 championship was won by the Swedish team Alliance, whose prize exceeded $1.4 million USD.The fourth iteration of The International took place at KeyArena in Seattle between July 18 and July 21, 2014, with the Chinese team NewBee becoming the new champions. Due to the funds raised by interactive compendium sales, the overall prize pool was elevated to over $10.9 million, the largest in the history of electronic sports.
Following the inaugural event of The International, several electronic sports tournaments began to transition from DotA to Dota 2, including the Electronic Sports World Cup. DreamHack would also support Dota 2 in 2011, following a year without support for the original, on account of the other multiplayer online battle arena titles Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends. By the end of its first year in its beta phase, Dota 2 was one of the highest-paying eSport titles of 2011, second only to StarCraft II. Dota 2 began as an official title for the World Cyber Games annual event in 2012.^[95] The Electronic Sports League began a seasonal tournament for Dota 2 called the RaidCall EMS One in 2013, which was the largest independent tournament for Dota 2 by the beginning of 2013. Beginning in September 2013, the Association of China E-sports began a Dota 2 tournament called the WPC ACE Dota 2 League, which had the largest grand prize by a third-party in electronic sports history and the largest prize pool for Dota 2 beyond The International.On June 12, 2013, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, Nexon announced the investment of two billion South Korea won, (approximately 1.7 million USD), into amateur and professional leagues in South Korea for 2013, to coincide with the launch of their distribution agreement in the fall of that year.Erik Johnson commented in an interview that the implementation of the game's LAN feature was intended to promote smaller, independent competitions and local tournaments