Valve formally launches its Dota 2 battle arena game

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
July 10, 2013
Updated June 18, 2025
1 min

Valve formally launched its multiplayer online battle arena game Dota 2 on Tuesday.

Dota 2, named after the original Defense of the Ancients mod for the real-time strategy game Warcraft III, has been in the works for a few years. For the past two years, Valve put the game through a beta test. It became the largest active community in Steam’s history, with a monthly user base of more than 3 million players. The peak concurrent users, or the number that played at one time, was more than 300,000.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.