Valve: DotA 2 As A Spectator Sport

Thesteamcast.com held a podcast interview with Valve managing director Gabe Newell and Project Manager Erik Johnson where they touched on some aspects of DotA 2 without going into too much detail. What we did take away from the interview is the fact that Valve will be putting a lot of effort into how players spectate DotA 2 games. An excerpt from the interview is below:

Newell: The piece of the puzzle that I’m always curious about is that nobody’s done a good job of making watching that (multiplayer competitive gaming) entertaining enough. If I could take six months off just to work on that problem, that’d be pretty cool. Because I think there's a huge amount of opportunity there.

Obviously, there's a bunch of things that professional competitive gamers care about. You know, like, I care about this in terms of latency. I care about this in terms of user interface issues. I care about this in terms of how tournaments are managed. And those things are all pretty tractable, and the nice things about professional gamers is they tend to be sophisticated in their descriptions of what it is that they would like. It's pretty easy to get a laundry list from them and say, okay, we can do three of these right away. I think the harder problem is how to make what they are doing, which is awesome…every time I see one of the people at the elite levels playing any game whether it's WoW or DOTA or Counter-Strike it's just stunning how good it is. But I think what's also stunning is the terrible job we as an industry have done so far in terms of making it entertaining to watch and appreciate how talented and skilled those people are.

So if I had to pick one problem to tackle in that space it would be to make it more fun to be a spectator. Is there anything that you know about what's going on with the competitive scene…?

Johnson: I think DOTA is going to be the product where we are going to focus on this problem. It presents some advantages over some of our other games in terms of viewing just because of the type of game it is. It has a very well established mature professional scene. We're going to push on this. I think it's way undervalued. There's a lot of room there.