The International 2024 To Be Held in Copenhagen

Valve announced in an official blog that The International will be coming to Copenhagen’s Royal Arena.

The tournament, due to take place in September this year, is one of the top events in esports. Despite some difficulties in recent years, Valve is back for more.

Credit: Valve

The International returns the Europe

For only the third time in its 13 year history, The International is coming back to Europe. Copenhagen is seeing a huge surge in top tier esports tournaments this year, with the PGL Copenhagen Major and the RLCS Major 1 also taking place in the city.

But none are quite as prestigious as The International. After something of a disappointing end to last year that saw the final prize pool barely scrape past $3 million, Valve will really have to pull out all the stops to make this year special.

Midas Mode – a game mode developed in 2017 by Moonduck – was name dropped in the blog and so should be making a return this year. Whether as an in game mode or separate tournament isn’t quite clear. But papa Gaben wouldn’t tease us without dropping it eventually, right??

Qualification details revealed

Since the removal of the DPC, the road to TI hasn’t exactly been clear. Yes, the EPT points are giving teams some idea of where they stand but as to actually securing an invitation, no one really knew.

The blog post confirmed that 16 teams will compete this year through open qualifiers, regional qualifiers and direct invitations. As always, the direct invites will be sent to the teams “based on team performance during the year”. So it seems every tournament from DreamLeague to ESL One to the new PGL tournaments will count.

In-game events

Now that The International battle pass is a thing of the past, fans have been expecting more events to drop throughout the year. The goal was to make the year in Dota less TI-centric and have more events spread throughout the year. This would also help the TI prize pool grow more gradually throughout the year instead of releasing it a month or so before the tournament.

In a blog from February 8th, Valve confirmed the intention to release a new update named Crownfall as soon as possible. But a month on, nothing else has been revealed.

They have certainly been hard at work with the Dota Labs update. But fans are hungry for the new Dota hero, Ringmaster. The hype is real, let’s see what’s next for Dota!