2019 was a particularly strong year for Dota 2having managed to once again accrue over 1 million players, and Valve clearly has no intentions of stopping support for the title, with a new esport event happening later this month. However, there are signs that the game is somewhat struggling at the moment, with its player count gradually dropping.

Dota 2's player count peaked at 1,064,377 players back in September 2016, and the numbers have overall declined since then. At the time of writing, the average player count has reportedly fallen to below 385,000, and the peak player count has dropped to roughly less than 628,000. The exact numbers can be found at Steam Charts.

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While there is still a large number of players who do keep coming back, it's clear that new characters and updates to the game might not entirely be enough for others, and Valve may need to make some serious changes.

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With less players, it makes matchmaking time worse in the higher levels of ranked, and ultimately makes finding matches more difficult, which in turn could frustrate players enough to quit the game and move on to something else, thus creating a vicious cycle. This could also lead content creators who specialize in Dota 2 to ditch the game if this affects their viewership.

There doesn't seem to be any single reason why so many players are leaving, but the last year may have provided a couple of explanations. In September, Valve introduced a new system for dealing with toxic and troublesome players that banned them from the game for 19 years. While this is widely considered a good thing, it's possible that enforcing these bans has led to the decreased numbers.

Another reason could be related to the protests in Hong Kong. In August, Valve held a Dota 2 tournament in China, which greatly upset those that supported the protests. Numerous players took to the event's Twitch chat to flood it with messages related to the protests and were then banned for doing so.

Considering a number of players dropped their support of Activision Blizzard's titles due to its own Hong Kong controversy, it's not unreasonable to believe that members of Dota 2's player base would do the same.

Dota 2 is available on PC.

MORE: Valve Accused of Blocking Hong Kong Protest Games from Steam

Source: Dot Esports