joinDOTA

» see joindota.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

joinDOTA started before the game did. Its first news post is dated 26 June 2011 at 20:44 Berlin time and the slug is joindota-beta-website-is-live-1, post number one. The site's own meta description that summer called it "a website dedicated to the coverage of DOTA eSports with a focus on the upcoming Valve title 'DOTA 2'". Upcoming. Dota 2 would not reach a public release for another two years.

Behind it was Freaks 4U Gaming, a Berlin company whose other job was running the plumbing of European esports, from studios to broadcast crews. Two months after that first post, the operation put on the inaugural The International at gamescom in Cologne, with a prize pool Valve had set at $1.6 million, which in August 2011 was an absurd number for a video game tournament. Natus Vincere won it. Everything the modern Dota calendar is built on starts at that event.

My own version of competitive gaming had closed by then. The internet cafes I spent 2002 to 2005 in ran Counter-Strike, five against five, people shouting across the room rather than at a stream. The MOBA wave arrived after I had stopped going, and I watched Dota 2 become an industry entirely as a reader. joinDOTA is a site I knew existed the way you know a trade paper for a profession you are not in.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually built ~

The news desk was only half of it. joinDOTA League kicked off in January 2014 with close to 10,000 players, roughly 2,500 teams, split across three regions that ran from Europe to Southeast Asia. It ran sixteen seasons over six years and spent two of them under the MLG banner. There was a podcast, talkDOTA, which made 38 episodes from 2012. There was a show called Matchmaking that went live in July 2014 and pulled more than three million views across twenty episodes. The Defense ran five seasons, the last broadcast in December 2015 out of Studio 1.2.1, then the biggest room in the Berlin offices.

It was also a place people got started. Toby "TobiWAN" Dawson and Austin "Capitalist" Walsh, two of the voices most Dota viewers can identify blind, both came up through joinDOTA's stage. The farewell post makes the point without boasting about it: the site "provided a gateway for enthusiasts and volunteers into esports, with many of them still working in the industry to this day".

~ the numbers they left on the counter ~

Shutdown posts rarely publish the meter readings. This one did, as a plain list. 1.5 billion page views against 9,000 news posts, which the authors converted to more than five million words written. Underneath that, 80,000 forum threads and 55,000 matches covered on the ticker, plus a thousand event coverage pages. On the video side, 7,000 uploads, 80 million views, 40,000 hours streamed and over a billion minutes watched.

Almost all of that was volunteer work. The casters and the ticker crew were largely people doing it because they wanted the scene to have a record.

~ fourteen days ~

The notice went up on 17 March 2022 and reads, typo included: "After being live for more than a decade since launch joinDOTA will be closing it's doors on March 31st, 2022." No bad quarter was blamed and no acquisition was announced. Freaks 4U said the decision came "after much mulling over about the Dota 2 ecosystem and where we want to fit within", and promised to keep running Dota projects when something worth doing came along, naming the Dota tournament at Germany's ESL Meisterschaft.

A moderator said the site would stay readable while they worked out how to preserve the archive. It did not. joindota.com no longer resolves, and the 1.5 billion page views now live where ArchiveBot put them.

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