Dota 2 is renowned for its humongous prize pool and rocked an annual prize pool of about 47 million dollars in 2019. The majority of this prize pool comes from The International. The International, often abbreviated as TI is an annual Dota 2 tournament organized by Valve which accounted for a whopping 34 million dollars prize pool last year. Needless to say, it is the biggest esports tournament in the world in terms of the prize pool.
A huge part of this prize pool comes from the players of the game since the tournament is primarily crowdfunded. TI9 started with a base prize pool of 1.6 million dollars by Valve and the rest was made up of 25 percent of all Battle Pass sales, which was nearly 33 million dollars.
Due to the enormous hype around this tournament, Dota fans from across the world wait eagerly for an entire year for TI to happen. However, due to the unfortunate pandemic that is currently wreaking havoc worldwide, it isn’t very likely that we’re gonna see TI10 happening this year. Some Redditors anticipated this, and instead of getting upset over it they want to do something for the betterment of the world.
One such Redditor is u/Ipug21, who came up with the idea of a “Covid-19-Relief-Compendium”. As he mentions in his Reddit thread, usually 25% of all battle pass sales directly go to the International prize pool, but he believes an additional 25% of this share could be given to a Covid-19 relief effort. Since the tournament would be held online, it’d also spare Valve the expenses of venue, lighting and many other stuff making the additional 25% donation seem much more reasonable.
If Valve decides to go through with this idea, it will potentially be a historic event. During the economic crisis the countries are going through, a share of this enormous prize pool would certainly go a long way.
u/Ipug21 in his post also predicts the headlines they’d make, “Nerds raise $30 Million for COVID-19 relief, Dota-2 proclaimed the national eSports for 30 countries“.
Some people are claiming in the comments that this idea is absurd since the International will likely be delayed instead of being cancelled. While we do wish for the International to happen as soon as possible, a charity event on a grand scale like this sounds truly historic.
