Not only is Valve’s own International Dota 2 tournament the largest eSports competition in the world, but its prizes rival those in conventional sports. The International 5 wrapped up last week, with winning team Evil Geniuses taking home $6.6 million of the $18.3 million prize pool.
Dota 2 isn’t the only popular game that Valve has at its disposal, nor is it the only one with a sizable eSports community. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive often sees some of the highest player counts on Steam, second only to Dota 2, and is already a popular game at tournaments. It makes sense that Valve would be planning an International-style event for CS:GO, right?
Not anytime soon, according to an IGN interview with Valve’s Erik Johnson. While Johnson didn’t flat-out deny that a tournament was a possibility, it’s clear that it isn’t a high priority for Valve at the moment. When asked if a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament was coming Johnson simply replied “I don’t know that it has to be coming.”
“We’re pretty comfortable with different projects taking different approaches to solve similar problems,” Johnson told IGN. “As a company we actually learn more when we do that. If we all point everything in the same direction, we’d have a real blind spot for when we’re screwing up. In some ways, you want to diversify a bunch of decisions across different projects because you zero in on the right answer quickly, as opposed to ‘we have this thing that’s working, everybody do that right now.'”
So what is the company focusing on? For the time, Dota 2 Reborn, which is essentially a port of Dota 2 to Valve’s new Source 2 engine. With The International out of the way for another year, the company is ramping up efforts on moving its most popular game to the new engine.
“Fundamentally what Source 2 does is let everyone at Valve who makes game content be more efficient, it allows us to do everything more efficiently,” Johnson explained.
As for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, it’s likely that the game will also make its way to the Source 2 engine, but there is currently no word of when this might happen. “I’m sure it’ll end up on Source 2 at some point,” Johnson said.
