Few people love Valve's games more than Valve employees. Even semi-retired founder Gabe Newell said last year that he still plays Dota 2, the studio's evergreen MOBA, "every day" as he enters his 60s. Which is quite a long time to dive headfirst into a MOBA on a daily basis, given that Newell also said he was "obsessed" with the game as early as 2011.
In an old interview with PC Gamer, Newell examined his Dota 2 obsession and sized up the MOBA genre's popularity. His comments stand out to me even today amid Newell's continued presence at The International, the biggest annual Dota tournament. At The International 2025, Newell said he plays the game daily despite the people who "talk shit at me in chat."
"About once a week people say, hey noob, uninstall the game and [censor blip]," Newell added. "But that's really about their enthusiasm, and the energy that they bring, and that's why, after all these years, I still play Dota every day."
Even over a decade ago, Newell seemed unable to escape Dota's grasp, and considered himself a "noob."
"I've played Dota 2 for about 800 hours," he said in 2011. "The cool thing about Dota 2 is that it's probably the game we've made that we're most obsessed with playing. As a games developer you tend to get pretty tired of the thing you're developing because you have to experience all the flaws and the difficulties. Dota 2? Every day after we're done working on the game, everyone goes home and plays it till two or three in the morning.
"So yeah, I love playing the game. I'm not even on the same plane as the guys who are playing here, so it's certainly exciting to see them play. After 800 hours I'm still pretty much a noob player when it comes to playing DotA games!"
Newell has said something to this effect in multiple International appearances. In his 2024 welcome, he reverently described his experience watching the first Dota 2 champions claim their throne. "The crowds may have grown bigger, the players and teams may have changed, but one thing hasn't: the joy we all take in watching the best players in the world play Dota 2," he said.
Past-Newell, then, was bang-on: MOBAs are uniquely compelling as PvP sandboxes go, capable of electrifying moments and memorable snap decisions. In 2011, Newell put on his designer cap – which he's rarely gotten a chance to wear since – and said, "The thing that really struck me when I played Dota 2 was that you're constantly creating and destroying plans in your head. You have a lot of expectations, but whether or not you're going to stay on that pathway is changing every five seconds."
In some ways, Dota 2 was Valve's RPG. "You go through this complete RPG arc in 40 minutes," Newell said, seemingly riffing on the progression and territory wars baked into each match. He also touched on the almost Pavlovian response learned by MOBA diehards: re-queue.
"The first thing you want to do after you've had a great game is play another game, and the first thing you want to do after you've had a bad game of Dota 2 is play another game," he reasoned. This cuts to a rare quality that's perhaps strongest in PvP games, something that Blizzard veteran Chris Kaleiki described as how "sticky" a game is: once you're hooked, you are hooked deep, always hungry to find out what the next match holds.
"I think there are a lot of lessons for game designers in it that are very complementary to the lessons from other genres," Newell continued. "If you play a lot of MMOs, there's stuff you can learn that's in Dota 2. If you play first-person shooters, there's a lot of stuff you can learn, so it's a nice arrow in the quiver for game designers."
And designers did learn from MOBAs. In the past decade, MOBAs have not only maintained a huge audience – League of Legends spawned some remarkably good spinoffs, and I pray for Valve to make something else in Dota's world – but their DNA has also been spliced into many other genres. The obvious one is Valve's Deadlock, a MOBA-shooter hybrid that had been swirling for years and is now, sort of, out in the wild, albeit in early development. Newell was on the money: if you play shooters, there's stuff you can learn from Dota.
Also top of my mind is Shape of Dreams, which is essentially a PvE MOBA built using the roguelike package. I spoke to the Korean makers of Shape of Dreams – mostly a bunch of college kids – about their inspirations, and they stressed that the dominance of MOBAs in Korean esports culture was a huge factor. So, Lies of P maker Neowiz was a match made in heaven as publisher.
Newell has been playing games longer than he's been making them, and has a history of minimizing his own player skill, as it happens. On the original Half-Life, he stressed that he was "not even close" to the best player at Valve. "I used to think I was pretty hot stuff when I was just playing against other people at Microsoft, but nowadays I just get crushed," he said all the way back in 1998. "We may have to do a strategy game just so I can regain my self esteem." Frankly, I just hope to still be MOBA-ready at Newell's age.
