Virtus.pro Sneg (CEO) take on the current professional Dota 2 scene situation.

I don't know to be honest. Western teams have wholedly failed, arguably only Liquid and EG have succeeded in regularly garnering the support of american and canadian fans, and I think that there we see the strong values North Americans place in supporting local/homegrown teams.

Western fans though tend to switch teams whenever there is a roster change. they supported navi, then puppey and kuroky left and they supported secret. or they supported Orange then when Mushi went to Dk they supported DK. Or they supported LGD then when xiao8 left they supported Newbee. Western fans largely support successful teams and star players. there is very little club loyalty, and I don't really see how clubs intend on building it given that they may not even have a dota 2 squad for 6 months. Again, I don't know how clubs/fans work in china, whether there is more club loyalty or the fans are just as focused on the players as we are.

I think what needs to happen is that teams need to sign players to mulit-year contracts.

do you think that would work in dota, or league or csgo? I'm not a football expert but largely the necessary relationships are between players and the manager/coach. if a full back and a striker don't get on that well it isn't that big of a deal; these are 11 man squads, they aren't best buddies on and off the pitch, they don't need to all strategize about the game the same way, there's no difference in goals that you might get with dota players, they all want to win and they all are capable of playing how the manager wants. whereas we've seen from ppd, envy, FLUFF, lots of players who have said that when you bring a team together it's important for everyone to be on the same page, no bad blood, mutual goals, etc. for the team to flourish. IMO there is not this upper echelon of hyper competent players who are capable of playing any style and type of strat, are perfectly fine with deferring to another person's judgement etc. and when there are only 5 players in a team, personal conflicts, differences in ideas etc. are much harder to deal with

there's also the issue of the general instability of teams and organizations. most premier league teams have been around for decades. they aren't going anywhere. their squads and support infrastructure, coaches, managers, marketers etc. aren't going anywhere. dota teams? what was the last you heard of liquid in the scene? or dignitas? or Mouz, or DTS, or mortal teamwork, or sigma? mouz dropped their team after TI and disappeared. DTS Gaming is dead, mortal teamwork is dead, dignitas hasn't had a team since late last year, these old guard teams all have potential to build fan bases but the volatility of the scene just means they get nothing. out of all the european teams I think alliance is in the best spot for fan bases, having an all swedish squad win TI and keep the squad majority swedish lends itself to a strong swedish fanbase, if only dota was popular in sweden. Navi's popularity is carried wholly on the backs of Dendi Puppey and XBOCT, and the rest of the orgs don't really have fan bases. Maybe VP and Navi have dedicated fans in eastern europe. but when organisations keep dying or leaving the scene for a while it really hurts stability, it hurts the ability for new viewers to follow the scene when they have to become familiar with new organizations constantly.

there's just no reason to follow most of these organisations that do not stay in the scene for a long time.

/r/DotA2 Thread