An eSports Team Will Win $6.5 Million for Playing 'Dota 2' This Week

Today marks the beginning of the 2015 International Dota 2 Championships, which will have the biggest cash prize in eSports history.

By the time this week is over, one out of 16 teams, which earned their place in this tournament with many qualifying matches, will make it through the brackets to the grand finals, where it will compete for the top honor and almost $6.5 million.

That first place prize comes out of the event's total prize pool of $18 million, so coming in second with $2.7 million or even sixth with $1.1 million isn't too shabby either.

Developer Valve's event is breaking its own record here, set by the prize pool for the 2014 International Dota 2 Championships, which was almost $11 million. The company is able to secure such large prize pools with a deviously clever scheme that leverages the game's more than 10 million monthly active players.

Every year leading up to the event, Valve starts selling the Compendium, a digital, interactive program for the competition, where players can keep track of the different teams and make predictions. Players who buy the Compendium can also compete in Dota 2 challenges and buy additional items to get special in-game trinkets that modify the appearance of their Dota 2 characters. Twenty-five percent of all Compendium and Compendium-related sales go toward The International prize pool, and the bigger it gets, the more rewards unlock for all Compendium owners, kind of like Kickstarter stretch goals.

Needless to say, these incentives work very well for Dota 2 fans, and the record-breaking prizes are great publicity for Valve.

Like the incredibly popular League of Legends, Dota 2 is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, where two teams of five players each choose one out of over 100 heroes to control from an overhead perspective, and fight for control of a map defined by three lanes. The number of different characters and their abilities makes Dota 2 incredibly complicated and hard to follow if you're not an avid player, but Valve is aware that The International might draw in new viewers.

It took Valve only a few minutes to sell all 10,000 tickets of Seattle's Key Arena, where The 2015 International Dota 2 Championships take place, but the event is also being livestreamed via Steam Broadcasting, YouTube, Twitch, and WatchESPN. Fans can also attend several pub crawls, and over 400 theaters across the United States the are screening the event.

For those who are checking it out for the first time, Valve has also set up "Newcomer Shows," a special broadcast with commentary designed to ease people into the crazy complicated rules of Dota 2. At the time of writing, more than 132,000 people were watching the Twitch livestream.

I play a lot of games, have dabbled in MOBAs, and to be honest, Dota 2 is still pretty much impenetrable even with a lot of handholding.

That being said, the fanfare and roaring crowds at Key Arena are hard to resist, and even if you don't understand Dota 2, you can still follow the drama surrounding doping, match-fixing, and cheating from the sidelines.