Over 780,000 players are playing DOTA 2 on Steam – Does it benefit from the “Arcane Effect”?

DOTA 2 is one of the biggest games on Steam. Now it has reached a new peak in players, not seen in many months. Netflix could be the reason.

How is DOTA 2 doing right now? According to steamcharts Dota had 786,118 concurrent players in January 2022. The last time the Moba had that many players was over a year ago – in May 2020.

With the mass of players, DOTA 2 is currently the 2nd most played game on Steam, right after Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and well ahead of the all-time favorite PUBG: Battlegrounds.

Valve’s game has consistently had strong player counts for years, rarely going up or down. Usually this happens at major esports events, which are among the biggest in the world, or at new seasons in DOTA 2.

This time, however, nothing happened that could explain such an increase. At least not in the game itself.

Netflix series may provide new players

Where are the players from? Dragon’s Blood, a separate series for DOTA 2, has been available on Netflix since March 2021. This went into the second round on January 18 with Season 2 – or “Book 2”, as it is called.

Also, at the same time, the Aghanim’s Labyrinth game mode has been updated with new rewards, and an exclusive International 2021 Reward Box is now available. The tournament had its final in October 2021.

What does Arcane have to do with it? At the end of 2021, Arcane, a series similar to Dragon’s Blood, was also released on Netflix. However, this is purely about the history of League of Legends, the big competitor of DOTA 2.

Arcane hit #1 on the Netflix charts in 38 countries and caused interest in LoL to soar. Especially the heroes with leading roles were particularly in the limelight.

Initially, Dragon’s Blood caused little excitement in DOTA 2. It’s possible that interest in the series, and therefore in the Moba, only really grew with the success of Arcane.

Since the number of players in DOTA 2 has been rising steadily since September 2021 with some fluctuations before, several factors are probably at play here. E-sports in particular are repeatedly celebrated in DOTA 2:

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