Hacker Cinema
Free to Play
2014 · Film · documentary · 75 min
Follow three professional video game players as they overcome personal adversity, family pressures, and the realities of life to compete in a $1,000,000 tournament that could change their lives forever.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
Free to Play (2014) [1] I've enjoyed this documentary a lot. It follow three DOTA players and theirs life prior to 'The International', a first million dollar e-sport tournament. What caught my attention the most, is that, despite the three main characters (Dendi - Ukraine, Fear - USA, hyhy - Singapore) come from very different backgrounds and cultures, they treat the game almost the same - as a way of living.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZYMI1zB9s
I've been watching this game for years, and I can say with confidence that Sumail is the real deal. He has skills that few can match. Right now he's playing the middle of the biggest tournament in e-sports history and he's about 10 games away from winning $6 mil (of which he'll keep $1m). The tournament, organised by Valve has a prize pool that's mostly crowd funded, so its likely to be a steady source of income for the top players of Dota 2 for a few years at least.
I guess we'll know by next Saturday what Sumail's fate is.
For more info
* Free to Play, a documentary about 3 Dota players - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZYMI1zB9s [75 mins]
* Dota 2, a game that's free to play - http://store.steampowered.com/app/570
* The International tournament - http://www.dota2.com/international/overview/
If anyone has any questions about this I'll be happy to answer :)
The prize pool for the upcoming Dota 2 tournament is now the largest prize pool ever in esports history, which is why I'm submitting it to HN. It's an interesting new phenomenon, because it seems to indicate that esports may finally be taking off.
Valve basically crowdfunded their tournament prize pool. They started out by offering an initial $1.6M prize pool, but gave every dota 2 player the option of buying a "compendium" for $10, and each compendium increases the prize pool by $2.50. That means Valve makes $7.50 per compendium sold.
I just ran the math, and as of right now there have been ($3,365,563 - $1,600,000)/$2.50 = 706,255 compendiums purchased. Since Valve earns $7.50 per compendium, that means they just made $5.3M in a couple days. And they're set to make even more next year, since the Dota 2 playerbase has some nice exponential growth: http://steamgraph.net/index.php?action=graph&appid=570&from=0
I'm not sure there are any articles about this yet, because this news is so new. I wish I had a decent article to submit to HN instead of this link. But this is certainly newsworthy, so it's a matter of time before you start hearing other news sources talking about it.
EDIT: If you're looking to see what a Dota tournament is like, here are two great matches from last year:
Game 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaGSi1YTA-E
Game 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajQuCZx-yx8
The production quality is so good!
EDIT2: Also, Valve made a movie called "Free to Play" which documents what life is like for top-tier Dota players: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZYMI1zB9s