The finals of The International 2025, the annual Dota 2 world championship tournament, are now underway, and to get things started on the right foot Valve boss Gabe Newell shared a special message with fans: After all these years he still loves the game, even though a lot of you are pretty mean to him online.
"14 years ago, we held the first The International in the German city of Cologne," Newell said (via JakeSucky), presumably from the comfort of one of his yachts. "The first International truly amazed me. It was amazing to see the players’ skill and the passion of the community. Before the first International, I really liked the game, but after TI I fell in love with it. I love not only the game, but also the community."
Heartwarming, isn't it? And, it seems, also true: Newell said in 2011, after the first International, that he'd put about 800 hours of playtime into Dota 2, and that "it's probably the game we've made that we're most obsessed with playing."
"Every day after we're done working on the game, everyone goes home and plays it till two or three in the morning," Newell said, way back then. "So yeah, I love playing the game."
But it's not just the game he loves, Newell continued in his new video message: It's the community of players who bring it to life.
"Sure, people talk shit at me in chat, and about once a week people say, 'Hey, noob, uninstall the game and ********,' but that's really about their enthusiasm for the game, and the energy that they bring. And that's why, after all these years, I still play Dota every day."
"Sure people talk sh*t at me in chat... I still play Dota every day"Gabe Newell's intro for The International😂 pic.twitter.com/90LQoGeTQhSeptember 11, 2025
Okay, well, that's maybe a little less inspirational, but full points for telling it like it is: That's the real Dota experience, alright. Of course, there are good odds here that Newell isn't being entirely serious about the whole thing: He's known for having deadpan fun with this sort of thing, maybe most famously with the Potato Phone episode of 2022. Compared to that, this is positively restrained, but still pretty great.
The finals of The International 2025 kicked off today at the Barclays Arena in Hamburg, Germany, and will run until September 14, with a $2.6 million prize pool up for grabs. You can follow along with the action at dota2.com.
